This is the first of a series of articles this summer covering the state of education in our community

May 29, 2025 Seward Folly Staff

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District (KPBSD) Board member who represents Seward and Moose Pass brings a lifetime of local ties and a candid view of public education’s mounting pressures.

She was born in Homer and moved to Cooper Landing when she was nine. Her school years included one year of homeschooling and firsthand experience with how rural transportation shaped education access in the 1980s. Back then, the district would pay families to house students for school weeks in Seward — a solution her own parents declined, not wanting to be separated. Eventually, bus service arrived, in part due to her father’s avid lobbying, connecting Cooper Landing to Soldotna.

Cooper Landing School in the 1980s was tiny, and only served K-8 students. Virginia graduated from Skyview High School in 1991, with around 75 students in her class- and only a few of those from her small town.  Cooper Landing School didn’t serve 9-12 grade students until about 2010.

“I loved going to school in Cooper Landing,” she says of her early schooling.

She pursued degrees in music and education, taught middle school for five years, and watched her husband, Thomas Gossard, become the lead teacher at Cooper Landing K-12 in 2006. After seventeen years managing a K-12 school, much of it alone, Thomas took a position in Soldotna and now works at Skyview Middle School. Virginia and Thomas remain deeply involved in community life.

Her path to the school board started in 2019, when a vacancy opened. Martha Fleming, former counselor at Seward High School, ran but was deemed ineligible because she had just retired from the district. Virginia applied, and was appointed to finish the term. She won election in 2020 and again in 2022, serving a total of six years so far.

“Salary is $300 a month — not really paid,” she notes with a wry laugh.

Small schools, she argues, hold the community together. “Small communities need young people to run the place, and young people have children.”

Commenting on the state’s emphasis on charter schools, Morgan points out that every new school that opens puts another at risk — especially when charter schools draw students away, providing no transportation or lunch programs and, in her words, “creating a kind of caste system.” Public education, she insists, is not a business and can’t be treated as one.

On the board, she chairs the policy review committee and serves on the charter school oversight and small schools committees. District-level roles include work on curriculum, literacy (a committee that hasn’t met recently), and instructional materials reconsideration (which rarely meets, usually only when book bans are discussed).

She describes her job as “providing students with the best education possible” while overseeing governance, executive, and judicial functions — approving policies, supporting the superintendent, and addressing grievances. She’s not involved in day-to-day decisions but visits schools whenever she can. She tries to represent her region, though she acknowledges that all communities sometimes feel like the “stepchild” of the district. Ultimately, the board must decide what’s best for the entire, very diverse, district.

Declining enrollment and shrinking budgets have hit hard. Federal COVID funding helped for a while, but now that’s gone, and costs keep rising.

“Since 2022 liability insurance has doubled, and self-insured health care went up 22%just last year, when we lose money, we lose staff — 80% of our costs are people.”

Virginia Morgan

High schools once had a teacher for every subject; that’s no longer affordable. Comparing the 2017 and 2026 state budgets, she points out that K-12 education funding fell by 5.8%, while the state corrections system rose 52% and public safety 80%.

“Education is the most accountable budget in the state — we’re measured in a myriad of ways. But other programs get automatic inflation adjustments, and we don’t.”

Virginia Morgan

She sees the rise in homeschooling as a response to both funding cuts and shifting culture. Allotment programs now pay for things like piano lessons and drive families to homeschool for opportunities otherwise unavailable at public schools. There’s also widespread misinformation about what’s taught in public schools, fueling this shift. In Seward, the Connections homeschool program now enrolls 65 out of the district’s 410 students, about 12%. The number of students homeschooled through other programs, such as IDEA is difficult to find.

“Every choice feels like a bad one,” she admits. “Every cut hurts — closing schools, cutting staff, cutting programs. There are no easy decisions.”

— Virginia Morgan

Her term on the board ends in 2025, and she hasn’t decided whether she’ll run again. The candidate filing period is August 1-15, with the borough election on October 7. Board meetings are all-day affairs once a month, with quarterly work sessions lasting two days.

“I get so many emails — sometimes I can’t respond,” she says, although she added she reads them all.

She notes the borough hasn’t funded schools to the cap, but the funding decisions haven’t been finalized.  

Staffing remains a challenge. The ratio of tenured to non-tenured staff continues to change with budget pressures. She notes the borough is waiting to see how the legislature and governor fund schools this year, before deciding whether to fund the schools to the cap.

“If the governor vetoes the budget, it takes 45 votes to override, and the legislature would have to reconvene.” Morgan is anxious about that happening. 

The board’s goals for Seward and Moose Pass schools include maintaining rigor and addressing behavior issues that followed the COVID years. She sees a cultural shift, with teaching now less respected as a profession.

Despite all this, partnerships endure. The district collaborates with the City of Seward, AVTEC, the Alaska SeaLife Center, Qutekcak Native Tribe, and the Seward Prevention Coalition — relationships she hopes will help sustain the schools and the communities they serve.

“If we lose our small schools, we lose the heart of our communities,”

Virginia Morgan

Looking ahead, Morgan worries most about what could be lost if current trends don’t shift.

She describes schools as the ‘glue’ that keeps families connected and gives young people a reason to stay or return after college or job training. Without them, she fears communities like Moose Pass and Cooper Landing could fade into little more than seasonal stops for tourists, stripped of their year-round vibrancy.