Legislative leadership said they have been working to negotiate with the governor ahead of his deadline to veto a landmark education bill passed with broad support last month, but they haven’t reached a deal and are unsure what he will do.
“We don’t know what the governor is going to do,” Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said during today’s Senate Majority news conference, noting that he has already been in talks with House Speaker Cathy Tilton about next steps. “He has not told us. He has not told House leadership. At this point, we’re thinking that if the governor does veto it, we’ll try to meet on Monday to deal with an override. How that turns out, too, I’m not sure.”
Overriding a veto of the education bill would require 40 votes from legislators. The education bill passed with 57 votes, but some Republican legislators who tolerated the compromise already indicated they would not vote to override a veto.
The day after the Legislature passed Senate Bill 140 by a 56-3 vote, which increases baseline funding for public schools by about $174 million annually, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy delivered a rambling hourlong news conference to criticize the legislation. He threatened to veto it unless a second education bill containing his priorities was passed by March 14, the deadline to veto it or allow it to become law without his signature.
No such legislation has materialized.
Instead, the Senate held a series of meetings highlighting shortcomings with his demand for a three-year $180 million study on teacher bonuses and changes that would make it easier to create new charter schools. The House Education Committee, which hadn’t met since mid-February due to infighting, only resumed hearings this week with none about the governor’s policy proposals.
At the Senate’s news conference, Senate Education Committee chair Sen. Löki Tobin said that the hearings were important and “really illuminated some additional work that might need to be done to vet those policies.”
At one of those hearings, Department of Education Commissioner Deena Bishop conceded that there is no clear evidence supporting teacher bonuses as an effective way to address recruitment and retention problems. She said it would be an opportunity to study them.
Many legislators and educators have questioned the wisdom of the plan, which is to cost an estimated $60 million annually. The state’s tight financial situation means that the money would likely come at the expense of the $174 million in baseline education funding they’ve already approved.
“The question remains: Is that the best and most effective use of the public’s dollar?” she said, noting that there are schools facing terrible infrastructure problems like black mold. “At this time, we’ll continue to review the teacher bonus proposal and try to figure out if there’s a pathway forward, but until we have dealt with some of these other really important and critical health and safety issues, I don’t think this is the right approach for us at this time.”
Tobin, along with Sen. Bill Wielechowski, has been part of the Senate’s negotiating team with the governor’s administration. Wielechowski characterized the negotiations as productive but said they had not yet reached an agreement to avoid the veto.
He said the main sticking point is the governor’s proposed changes for charter schools, which were never introduced as legislation but instead were included as a House amendment that was eventually stripped out of Senate Bill 140.
The proposal would allow the state Board of Education, wholly appointed by the governor and serving as an extension of the Dunleavy administration, to approve local charter schools without any input or oversight from the local communities that would be charged with running them.
Sen. Wielechowski said the removal of local input on charter schools is a “non-starter” with the Legislature, and he said if the governor plans to increase access to charter programs, many other factors need to be discussed, such as parental involvement requirements, transportation, infrastructure and the impact on neighborhood schools.
“Every dollar you’re putting into charter schools is a dollar you’re taking out of neighborhood schools,” he said, noting that many schools are already spending more on charter schools than they receive to fund them.
The deadline for the governor to veto the bill is midnight Thursday.
This story has been updated with an accurate count of the votes to pass Senate Bill 140. It passed with 56 votes for it, 3 against it, and one legislator out on an excused absence.
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.