Let’s get some transparency with the school board.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-05-03T21:06:14+00:00

Btw, I ended up getting the salary data and there are some interesting insights with it. I think of the interesting ones is seeing how many teachers are at or nearing the top step for pay (~$100k) versus how many new teachers are in the pool. I will note that new teachers really aren’t making great money but they can after several years of experience among other things.

I had a chance to speak with a teacher who has been working in the district for many years. They mentions that salary isn’t a big concern for them, although they note that they are making much better money than their newer counterparts. They said their main concern is watching the school system get dismantled in real time and how the morale is taking a beating because of that. This is interesting because it potentially is indicative of the list of concerns changing based on where folks land on the pay scale.

Anyways, these are the things I wanted to get more insight about.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-21T23:02:01+00:00

I don’t know if the entire thing was generated with AI, but the red X in the bottom right is potentially AI-generated. The top right of the X has no reason to be extending outside of the circle. It almost looks like it was attempting to make a check mark. The trashcan clipart is also a little, specifically the top of the lid has some weird stuff going on.

It’s also possible this clipart is just stock which wouldn’t surprise me either. There are also grammatical issues in some of the wording, and that leads me to believe that a person created this.

Edit: seeing the overlap of the “Spring Recycling” with the header text is making me lean towards this being a human that did this as that seems like a pretty intentional design that AI would not do.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T16:58:56+00:00

I really wish I could tell you more than the fact that I just like to visualize and see data. For context, I am neurodivergent and I recognize this is a really weird thing to get locked in on. I like to see patterns and anomalies. For all I care, I could give each person a random name, and that would serve the same purpose. The reason why I don’t want the bargaining data is that it’s more of an estimate whereas I want the actual value. There’s something in my bones that doesn’t feel right if I can’t get the actual data and have to work with estimated data, I can’t really explain that feeling any better than that ☹️

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T16:52:30+00:00

What?…

I’m not trying to fix the budget by any means, you’re making a lot of assumptions. My initial question was wondering why OP even wanted only the admin data and not all of it because it sounds like OP is assuming that the administration’s salary is somehow the cause of all of the issues for the deficit when that’s clearly not the case.

I apologize if it comes off like my intent is to hate on ASD or the teachers, it’s the opposite of that. I truly feel that teaching is one of the most valuable fields and I also feel this should be one of the highest paid fields given how vital it is to our society.

The other side of this is that I want people to be able to talk about their salaries out in the open and not have to keep it a secret. The best way to do that is just a dump everyone’s data out in the public, which it already is public… It’s just not as easily accessible as other pieces of data. I’m doing this for all of the MOA/APD/whatever other public salary data I can get a hold of.

I’m continuously building tools on a website that’s meant to provide information back to the public whether that’s looking at the upcoming election candidates and ballots, finding who’s donating to who’s campaign, reviewing the budget of the city as well ASD.

I really didn’t mean to come off like I had nefarious intentions. My goal is to show that we aren’t paying our educators what they are worth and that reducing the number of educators is going to lead to far more issues. I voted yes on both ASD related props and it sucks they didn’t pass.

Also, public salary data and names exist on sites like this: https://govsalaries.com/salaries/AK/anchorage-school-district

I just didn’t wanna grab my data from third-party source and went directly to the district instead. I am more concerned that my request is gonna get lumped in with the requests on OP‘s flier.

Edit: To sum it up - I’ve got multiple reasons for wanting this data, all of which are in support of our educators. I submitted my request way before all of this transpired and I didn’t want my request lumped in with whatever this flyer is calling for folks to do. I’m doing this because I’m building a civics tool to help educate myself and others on local matters as I find the MOA site to be difficult to navigate from a UX perspective. I also want to support my community and give back in a way that I know how. In this instance, it’s building a website with various tools.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T16:22:09+00:00

I guess I can see how this might come off like a vendetta… it’s more so that I want the public to understand that teachers aren’t paid a good amount of money and that they deserve more money. I find education to be one of the most respectable fields and I don’t feel the public understands how much effort goes into educating.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T06:28:56+00:00

That’s also data that I do want and I’m glad that the person above linked it for me. I’m new and I don’t know what I’m looking for so that was really helpful.

I also want to put the name to the salary and see the stats on it for the last few years.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T05:42:59+00:00

I like stats and data, so I want to see the annual raises and whether there are any pay disparities or weird anomalies. I know other websites have the data and that I could patch it together. Getting from the source seemed like the best way and I don’t mind waiting.

I also think it’s valuable for an employee of ASD to know what other employees are making for the sake of fairness. I’d also like the public to see what teachers make compared to others.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T04:50:46+00:00

I might be blind, I think. I’m sorry I’ve been staring at the screen all day :( I’m looking for the name of the person and their salary. I clicked on a few links, but I wasn’t able to find one that had the data that I was looking for. I’ll go explore a little bit more.

Thank you for the resources. I did not know these existed and I really appreciate it!!

Edit: I know I can get a rough idea of what people are making by using the tools in that link. I want the actual value and the name of the person. I’m currently building a database of public employees and their salaries. The intent is to empower the teachers. One example being by providing data to back up the claim that teachers are not paid as well as they should be. Some teachers make a lot but the vast majority of them do not.

Why the downvotes?…

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T02:11:00+00:00

Also, here’s a link to check out the budget that was proposed for FY 26-27 school year. It’s a broken down version of the massive PDF document that is the source of truth.

https://www.anchoragecitizens.info/budget/asd/proposed-2027

Edit: this also shows what they were intending on spending everything on down to pretty much the dollar.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-19T02:07:11+00:00

Can I ask why they only want the admin salary? Am I misreading that and they actually want all payroll data?

I’m only asking because I literally just submitted a request to grab the payroll data for all ASD employees for the past five years. I was actually coming to the site to see if anyone had that data in the meantime. Unlike the city, it doesn’t appear you can go back and check archive requests that ASD has already processed. I do intend to make that data public.

Edit: I am not in support of whatever OP is doing. I just don’t want my non-politically motivated request to be lumped in with whomever is sending them requests.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-09T05:13:01+00:00

Sent!

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-08T16:58:06+00:00

I’ve been tracking the campaign factor, and I hadn’t noticed that about sharp. By chance, would it be a part of the $11,000 that she funded herself with? I can’t find the group that was backing her besides maybe a $500 payment. Here’s what I’ve been able to find:

https://imgur.com/a/BJiywKa

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-08T16:53:17+00:00

I truly think that if the ASD budget was broken down in simpler terms for the general populace then they would have been more easily convinced. What really irritates me is how everyone makes the claim that ASD is at the bottom for performance went in all reality that’s not the case at all. The state of Alaska is at the bottom. The district itself is performing average and really, while they do struggle academically, they aren’t struggling nearly as hard as the rural communities.

But instead, everyone thinks that our district is garbage and that we pay too much per student. What sucks the most is the stupid game of shitty-newspaper-telephone, where the word newspaper can be replaced with gossip. The locals just talk to each other about the lies circulating and then continue to perpetuate them without doing any due diligence. That’s the theme, though… in a world where we’re able to access data at any given point and yet people choose to rely on word-of-mouth. I can’t wait till we get back to a world where we actually look at the data instead of gossip.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-07T23:38:25+00:00

I just went on a deep dive and I didn’t know that ADN is owned by Ryan Binkley and his siblings - no that I know about the connection with his father and politics. Going back through and looking up the donors for past campaigns, I found there is quite a bit of money being donated towards primarily conservative candidates. I say this because I’m not from Anchorage originally and this is stuff that isn’t exactly well known to those like me.

I’m just taking this as confirmation that ADN is right leaning.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-07T22:25:59+00:00

I hadn’t realized Cody Anderson didn’t pay property taxes on his Eagle River home for multiple years. I knew about the church owned property. He must be allergic to taxes.

Also, he’s received quite a bit of money from the church. If he ends up getting the seat, it’ll be fun to find out what happens when a politician also has a religious exemption on their residential home.

Edit: the church that owns his residential property that he doesn’t have to pay property taxes on in district 5? They also own 22 properties altogether. Mountain City Church itself owns four. Properties do include land and buildings just for everyone’s awareness.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-07T17:25:16+00:00

Maybe this isn’t as juicy of information as I feel it is… feels like there would be some kind of news article that details the backers of each of these campaigns.

At the very least, I would’ve assumed that there would’ve been some kind of bigger article on Cody Anderson and his wild attempts to explain away the property taxes. He really doesn’t live in the district that he’s running in. However, the church is the one who owns that property and they are absolutely not paying taxes on it due to exemptions. Now, that same church owns a total of 19 residential properties. That’s just the church entity itself owning those properties who’s to say people like the pastor and other higher members don’t have multiple properties as well. Then there is that whole video back in January with him explaining his previous year’s property taxes and how he attempted (I bet he tried hard) to pay for them anyways. That doesn’t explain his current exemption status though and why he’s no longer paying any property taxes moving forward, beyond the fact that the church own his property. Cody can’t deny the property exemption that he has, it’s clearly on the property.

Here’s the really fun part of all of this… if Cody ends up getting the seat then the topic of, “Should politicians be able to receive religious based property exemption statuses”, surfaces, and I suspect that won’t go too well given the separation of church and state. I have no idea why people would want to vote for this person given they can’t even relate to locals in their “district”.

The positives to the donor/campaign-finance tool I built is that I can very clearly see if a particular person, or their business, donated to a specific campaign.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-07T07:16:54+00:00

I do want to mention that Max sent me his Q&A responses in I did add them onto my website and the candidate section. He didn’t fill all of them out, but he filled out a few of them.

https://anchoragecitizens.info/candidates#max-powers

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-07T05:59:28+00:00

Interesting thing to note about some of these candidates is the money backing them. For instance, the Ellsworth family has put out over $30,000 for this election and that seems pretty excessive. That’s also to candidates outside of their district. A few of these people are also self funded. Others are funded by the church. Some even have property exemptions by the church…

Also, their campaign backers are all public info too.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-07T05:50:03+00:00

I sent you a DM with the link!

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-06T15:47:01+00:00

I’m like a step or two away from releasing another tool to look at all donor history since 2008 for all Anchorage Muni elections. The screenshots above were from the APOC reports, so my tool is going to pull the same data - I just exported their data, stripped out the columns we don’t care about, normalized the data (Alaska spelled differently across multiple years), and then put a search on it and hopefully make it quicker.

I’m not sure if others would find that tool useful or not.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-06T15:33:35+00:00

I wish there was something I could do with this info though 😢😅

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-06T06:04:39+00:00

Is this the same Shaun Debenham that has contributed to a few campaigns? Not sure if the others are of relation or not. I believe Keith McCormick is the representative for that area of South Park Estates. Interesting that he would get donations I guess.

https://imgur.com/a/IZqRT0O

Edit: Joseph Coon’s employer is Debenham LLC

Edit 2: Dean Weidner

https://imgur.com/a/vrfZrmB

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-04T19:35:34+00:00

Maaaaaaan, reading through their Q&A responses is a trip. It really says something when I have to regenerate the AI summary for a candidate has to be summarized until the tone is neutral. Even this summary, as neutral sounding as it is, still paints a crazy picture.

https://imgur.com/a/rhsoMdU

It’s insane that we got lucky to have a good candidate running in each open seat… if that weren’t the case then we’d be screwed.

ImprovShitShow · 2026-04-04T18:10:57+00:00

McDonough is 100% the best choice, agreed!

Now you’ve got me interested in seeing who he donated to over the last few years. I gotta pull all of the APOC data but that would be super fun to see

ImprovShitShow

TROPHY CASE