The Senate today passed what would be the largest single increase in school funding in state history, but it’s an increase that most legislators conceded will stave off the worst of the cuts after years of flat funding, rising inflation and expiring one-time money.
Senate Bill 52 mirrors the school funding increase envisioned in the House and Senate operating budgets as a one-time boost to education funding, about $174 million statewide. However, it would make that bump a permanent increase to the state’s base student allocation, a figure that’s used to determine each school district’s need based on its location, size and the needs of students.
School funding has been a critical issue this legislative session and one of the main priorities of the 17-member bipartisan Senate Majority. A dire financial picture for schools has come into sharp focus this session over dozens of hearings and many hours of public testimony. Between rising inflation, stagnant state funding and expiring one-time federal covid-19 money, most school districts in the state are staring down massive budget gaps that threaten essential school functions.
“When the BSA has its purchasing power eroded, those who get hurt the worst are our kids,” said Democratic Anchorage Sen. Löki Tobin, the chair of the Senate Education Committee who spearheaded the legislation, arguing that the Legislature has neglected schools for too long. “I like to think SB 52 holds us, the Legislature, accountable to our kiddos because we’ve been falling down.”
The legislation also contains measures to increase transparency around how school funding is used, establishing an online database to collect such information. The bill also directs the state to conduct long-term research on the educational outcomes of Alaska students.
The legislation was met with a flurry of amendments from far-right legislators that would have put additional sideboards on how schools can use the money and, in some cases, whether the schools would get all the money in the first place. One amendment by Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, would have withheld funds from schools that aren’t meeting certain testing requirements until they improve.
The amendments were all rejected by a wide margin, with Sen. Tobin describing the amendment to withhold funds from underperforming schools as a “the beatings will continue until morale improves” kind of amendment. Sen. Tobin and several other legislators argued against limiting how the money can be spent, arguing that decisions on how to use the funds best should be left to local communities to decide through their school boards.
“I know in the school district of my community; they have 58 open janitorial positions. They don’t have enough people to vacuum the classrooms; they don’t have enough people to make sure the toilets are working,” she said. “A student who is not getting good nutrition, a student who doesn’t have a clean classroom, a student who’s not able to participate in sport or activities is not going to have a well-rounded education.”
Sen. Hughes responded by suggesting that students should be the ones vacuuming the classrooms.
“I’m going to put the students above vacuuming the floor,” she said. “By the way, there are nations that are outranking us in academic performance, and in some of these countries, the students are cleaning the classrooms and vacuuming them at the end of the day. If we have to do that, by golly, let’s all pitch in and vacuum.”
Having defeated her amendments, Hughes ultimately said she had to vote against the increase altogether. She and a handful of far-right legislators argued that the current system lacks accountability, seemingly suggesting that school districts are intentionally underperforming while administrator budgets balloon.
The vote
Yeas: Sens. Bishop, Bjorkman, Claman, Dunbar, Giessel, Gray-Jackson, Hoffman, Kaufman, Kawasaki, Kiehl, Merrick, Olson, Stedman, Stevens, Tobin, Wielechowski
Nays: Sens. Hughes, Myers, Wilson
Educational outcomes
Many legislators who backed the legislation stressed that the funding was intended to keep things stable rather than provide any meaningful additional funding on top of the status quo. It’s meant to avoid the worst of the cuts, they argued, not to necessarily improve things.
“Just to keep the system running, we have to provide funding,” said Anchorage Republican Sen. James Kaufman, one of the majority’s most conservative members. “You can’t improve a process if it’s in a state of critical failure.”
He said that once the system is stabilized, it’ll be on legislators to create a sustainable and workable plan to improve academic achievement in Alaska. Others noted that test scores aren’t the be-all and end-all of schooling and that they should be looking at broader indicators of student achievement.
Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, a Kenai Republican with a career as a high school history teacher, said it’d be on everyone to work to improve academic achievement in Alaska, calling on people in the community to be more invested and involved with the success of their students.
“We need to look at our schools as a gym membership, you pay your money, and you go in, and you do the work,” he said, recalling seniors in his community attending his high school football practices and checking in on how he’s doing in math. “That’s the accountability we should focus on. What’s not accountable—what’s passing the buck—is treating education like a vending machine, and you put in your $2 and press the button, and you get your Dr. Pepper. That’s it; there’s no work involved there. You just pay for a product. That’s not how education works. It should be a gym membership where you pay your money and go to work to do the work to be successful. If we treat education like every other government program, where we write a check and are done, that will never work.”
And in a day where several Republicans opposed to the increase argued that school districts and school administrators were essentially scamming the state to line their pockets, intentionally letting students languish, Sen. Bjorkman said the negativity has to stop.
“If we want education to improve in this state, we’ve got to change the way we talk about it. You’ve got to be positive about education. I hear way too many people running down schools, running down teachers, running down support staff in schools, running down administrators who are trying their best to make sure that people improve in their educational outcomes,” he said. “Want to change educational outcomes? You’ve got to change the way you talk about it, and you’ve got to change the way people participate.”
What’s next?
The bill now heads to the House, which approved a $680 one-time increase to school funding in the budget passed last month. Several Republicans in the House, however, have resisted making that increase permanent and have suggested that more work is required on the school funding formula.
The House version of the BSA bill is currently in the House Finance Committee, which means that the legislation could move quickly if there’s ultimately the will on the dividend.
“I’m not convinced that it doesn’t have the opportunity to pass in the House,” Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, said at the Senate Majority’s weekly news conference later in the day.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
