It appears that this year’s fight over education funding isn’t over yet, despite legislators reaching a hard-fought education deal last month.
In an unprecedented meeting, Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Education Commissioner Deena Bishop told school districts on Thursday that they plan to veto the bill and slash school funding if legislators don’t comply with the governor’s demands.
The meeting was reported by Alaska Public Media and the Anchorage Daily News.
“It feels like all of the students, even the students that are most in need, are being held as bargaining chips,” Madeline Aguillard, the head of the Kuspuk School District who attended the meeting, told Alaska Public Media.
The threat marks the latest curveball for school districts that have struggled to craft budgets amid uncertain state funding, forcing them to make contingency budgets that outline severe cuts to teachers and programs. Legislators entered the session hoping to deliver a substantial increase in education funding, but those hopes were scaled back significantly amid budget turmoil and opposition from the governor.
Legislators reached a modest compromise deal last month after the governor vetoed a larger increase to baseline per-student funding. The deal would make the current one-time funding levels permanent, while incorporating some of the governor’s other priorities, such as a cellphone ban on school campuses and targeted reading grants for schools that demonstrate improvement.
That measure, House Bill 57, passed with a combined vote of 48 to 11, which would be enough to override a veto if everyone holds firm to their votes (not a guarantee). And even if legislators overcome that veto, Dunleavy has also pledged to go after the funding for it in the state budget, a veto that would have a higher bar to overcome.
The vote marked a cautious victory for legislators and school districts, a potential breakthrough that combined funding with policy and a way to pay for it. The reading grants, which make up the largest pot of new money, will only be funded if a tax change targeting online businesses’ sales in Alaska becomes law.
“We’ve asked about compromise all year, that’s been our theme,” Clayton Holland, the superintendent of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, told Alaska Public Media. “And I believe the legislators did that, right? They came up with a bill that no one really got everything they wanted out of it, which I think is … a good thing.”
Now, Dunleavy is demanding that the reading grants be unlinked from the tax bill, arguing that they should be funded through the state’s already-tight budget (Dunleavy proposed a budget with a $1.5 billion deficit and has broadly refused to entertain any new taxes).
His other demands include an open enrollment policy that legislators warn could block military families from enrolling in their local schools and an expansion of the public charter school approval system that would take control away from local communities. Both ideas have been non-starters with legislators, who say they might have merit but need more studying to understand the potential impacts.
The one demand that he seems to have dropped is a request to increase funding for homeschool programs on top of the baseline funding increase that everyone, including homeschool students, gets.
Still, the governor’s demands have fallen flat for school districts that are exhausted by the back-and-forth and are nearing the point of making their budget decisions for the upcoming year. Holland told the Anchorage Daily News that the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District would have a “fire sale” of cuts if his vetoes come to pass, but he still won’t be lobbying for the governor’s policies after the threat.
Frank Hauser, the Juneau School District’s superintendent, told the ADN that threatening school districts’ funding in an attempt to strong-arm them into supporting his policies was unprecedented and ignored the dire situation the districts were in.
“I did not hear a lot today about all Alaska students and their immediate needs. I think that all Alaska’s children need support now,” he told the paper.
If the governor’s cuts do come to fruition, the state could face another lawsuit challenging its adequacy of education funding. The state has been previously and successfully sued for not living up to the Alaska Constitution’s mandate to provide for a public education for all students.
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.
