The Senate gave another shot at legislation aimed at smoothing out the maintenance needs at the state-run boarding school, Mount Edgecumbe High School.
Senate Bill 146 would make the school eligible for funding through the Regional Education Attendance Area (REAA) maintenance program, which serves schools that lack local, tax-collecting governments to support them. It would also enable the fund to cover teacher housing, a common pressure point for rural districts in recruiting and retaining teachers.
Together, both measures are designed to spare the schools from relying on piecemeal budgeting by the Legislature — the kind that is frequently vetoed by GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
“That’ll take Mt. Edgecumbe out of being the third wheel in a two-wheel system,” said Sen. Bert Stedman, the Senate Finance Committee co-chair who has been an ardent supporter of the boarding school. “The organized communities have one classification of dealing with school funding, and the unorganized boroughs have another, and then Mt. Edgecumbe is out there in the wilderness.”
The measure passed the Senate 17-3 and has an excellent shot at passing through the House, but faces an unsurprisingly gloomy outlook with Dunleavy.
That’s because he vetoed an identical measure just last year.
In his veto message at the time, Dunleavy claimed elevating the funding for the boarding school or teacher housing “diminishes the equity across school districts.” He also complained that lifting the $70 million cap on the fund — allowing legislators to put more money into rural school maintenance in times of abundance — would create an open-ended liability for the state.
Asked why they’re bringing up the same measure again, Stedman said at the Senate Majority’s weekly news conference that “We don’t want Edgecumbe to be ignored. We’re trying to make the game level and fair to everybody. It’s not fair to Mt. Edgecumbe High School, and you can see that by looking at the condition.”
To be clear, there’s a massive backlog of maintenance in just about every single corner of the state. Students in rural communities have it particularly tough, with leaky, moldy and structurally unsound buildings being shockingly common. Just this year, a school abruptly closed its doors after the gym roof started cracking.
The state of Mt. Edgecumbe High School, which primarily serves Alaska Native students from rural communities, has been of particular concern this year after about a quarter of students disenrolled.
After a rare in-session trip, legislators said they were aghast at the status of the once-prestigious school. In follow-up hearings, the school superintendent outlined his hope to have a couple of spare mattresses on hand, suggesting it’d be nice to have the funding to replace 10 a year (which would put the entire dorms’ replacement schedule on a 40-year cycle) and that with additional funding, they could expand the school.
While Senate Bill 146 likely won’t become law until there’s a change in the governor’s office, Stedman said he hopes that the effort sends a message to the administration that they need to be a partner to address what they can this year.
“I’m hoping that we’ll come up with some action plan jointly that can be executed so we don’t have to just butt heads, and the school ends up continually deteriorating. That’s unacceptable, so we can appropriate, but the executive branch has to execute, and we’re standing by ready to do our part now,” he said at the presser. “We want the Department of Ed to step up and do their part, and I think they will, because frankly, it’s an embarrassment for everybody, and the kids end up losing. So let’s all work together and try to come up with something that works.”
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.
