The path ahead for school funding was thrown into uncertainty this week after 17 Republican lawmakers flip-flopped on an education bill and refused to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto.
Some of those Republicans insist there’s still time and interest in passing a second education bill that contains an increase to the base student allocation in the remaining days of the legislative session. Senate Bill 140 outlined nearly a quarter-billion dollars in additional funding for public education, including a $680 increase to the BSA that would have translated to about $174 million in additional to districts.
“The path moving forward, as far as this caucus is concerned, is that we’ll continue to work on education,” said House Speaker Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, during a Tuesday news conference. “We do want to see that education is funded. We do want to have good policy.”
House Republicans have pointed to an entirely new bill, introduced by the House Resources Committee, as their alternative, which contains some of Senate Bill 140 and several provisions demanded by Dunleavy on charter schools and a teacher pay study. House Resources Committee chair Rep. Tom McKay, R-Anchorage, said it’s “a better bill that the governor would like.”
Many have called it a hollow effort to save face, pointing to the fact that McKay won his 2022 election by just nine votes.
Reinforcing that notion is the fact that a key member of the Republican-led House Majority is already casting doubts on any hope that a meaningful increase in school funding will be approved this year, signaling to districts to plan on uncertainty.
“I found it very disingenuous for us to continue to hold out what I believe is something they will not get,” said House Rules Committee chair Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, when explaining why he turned on the education bill. “I think it’s time for the education community to start planning their budgets on not getting it. There will be some funding — I have no idea what it will be — but I just want to be honest and forthright with people and to lay out the realities that the likelihood of a $680 BSA inside the formula is not very good.”
Members of the bipartisan Senate Majority said they were frustrated by the turn of events, noting that the version of Senate Bill 140 that passed the Legislature with 56 votes was the compromise. Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, a negotiator for the Senate, said that they had already given up ground on the governor’s demands and that they weren’t willing to cave completely.
“We’re being asked to come forward with a compromise to the compromise to the compromise,” he said, later adding that he wasn’t sure what room there was left to give. “I don’t know that there’s any more, quite frankly. I don’t think there is.”
Instead, Senate leadership seems to be taking a “you broke it, you fix it” approach to education for the rest of the session. Senators noted that they have already passed several education bills over to the House.
“Majority legislators in the House were able to kill the overriding of the governor’s veto, which is only one-third of the Legislature. The onus is now on them, I believe, on the House, to send us meaningful legislation,” said Senate President Gary Stevens during the Senate Majority’s weekly news conference. “The ball is now very clearly in their court. If representatives dismiss Senate Bill 140 and all the good things that were negotiated in that bill, you really have to tell us what you want to replace it with.”
Still, that didn’t cool the ire that many senators had toward the governor and his Republicans for blowing up what had been a landmark deal on education.
“I want to point out the irony of the work the governor did to get no votes on the education funding,” said Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage. “The governor has talked for the past two years about prioritizing families and making this a family-friendly state. Well, families are moving away. They’re going to leave if their kids are not getting solid educations … The governor has said, ‘Time to move on, time to move on and talk about energy.’ Well, we can’t talk about energy if we don’t have a population of Alaskans who are prepared to do the projects. It is very ironic that he wanted a no vote on a bill that did so much.”
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.