School districts around the state this week are beginning a grim annual tradition of notifying hundreds of teachers that their jobs could be cut without additional funding.
The notices are a product of local school budgets that need to be approved while the final funding figure from the Alaska Legislature is still up in the air. Typically, the notices are reversed once the state budget is finalized, but school administrators told legislators at a joint hearing of the House and Senate Education committees on Monday that the cost of the uncertainty is growing.
Officials at the hearing told legislators the uncertainty and timing have been costly for districts in more ways than one. Even if the funding is secured, teachers may decide enough is enough and look for work in other states. Recruiting and training new teachers isn’t free, and that’s if they can find them – some 600 classrooms in Alaska began the year without a permanent teacher even as districts are turning to foreign teachers. And that’s not to mention the educational impact of relying on a revolving door of new, inexperienced teachers unfamiliar with Alaska.
“Right now, we have 160 staff members who don’t know if they have positions next year,” Kenai Peninsula School District Superintendent Clayton Holland told legislators. “So what happens is people leave for jobs they can get elsewhere.”
That included one of the testifiers at the hearing, Rick Dormer, the principal of Ketchikan High School and president of the Alaska Association of Secondary School Principals, who told legislators that he’s in the process of looking for work in Oregon.
“Because if I go to Oregon, I can get a defined benefit package, I can have higher wages, I can have a lower cost of living, and I don’t have to take the time and expense to get on a Boeing jet to see my family,” he said. “It is a challenge. We want to stay. I want to stay, but we’re also highly educated professionals. We have personal goals. We have professional goals. And I can tell you that there are a lot of options out there.”
The hearing served as a bit of a gut check on the state of public education in Alaska as the Legislature enters the second half of its legislative session. The bipartisan majorities supportive of additional funding and other changes aimed at keeping teachers are facing continued GOP resistance from legislators and a governor that seem to insist the financial problems and uncertainty facing school districts are overstated, falling back on rhetoric about Alaska’s per-student funding being too high for the poor standardized test results. Efforts to improve things for teachers, such as pensions, have also been met with similar naysaying.
Officials told legislators that the root problem, as much as Republicans would like to deny it, is that there isn’t enough money to go around. That a decade of flat funding and one-time allotments with the adage of “we need to do more with less” is leaving schools in a difficult place of constant cuts, consolidations and costly uncertainty. Demands that they make improvements on a litany of problems from student unhappiness, test scores, chronic absenteeism and everything else are difficult to impossible when districts are having trouble just keeping the lights on.
“When I hear education is failing, I say no education is starving,” said Dr. Lisa Parady, the executive director of the Alaska Council of School Administrators. “It’s not failing; it’s starving. If we can make education whole, and you’ve heard over and over already the areas where we need to invest, we can retain kids and keep their interest and support them. But we’re struggling to provide the core, and I think once we get to the point where we’re whole and we can provide that, we can be focused on all the things that we know that can engage families, which we are trying to do, but we can’t keep doing it all with less and less and that’s where we’re at today. We need to think about how we can do things different, but we can’t continue to do it while we’re continuing to cut and cut and asking our people to do more and more with less.”
House Bill 69, the education bill, is currently in the Senate Education Committee, where it has already gone through public testimony and is awaiting amendments before it advances to the Senate Finance Committee. The legislation and its roughly $250 million price tag will be one of the major pieces of the final day of the legislative session, as legislators figure out how to make the budget balance. It could also very likely face another veto from Dunleavy, which likely would force districts to settle on another year of one-time funding and another year of costly uncertainty.
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 Bluesky.
