Alaska House Republicans on Wednesday threw their weight behind an attempt to slash $158 million in additional funding for public schools, but ultimately came up short.
The bipartisan House Majority included the money in its version of the state operating budget, arguing that despite last year’s historic increase in baseline per-student funding, the state’s public education system is still struggling with high costs and still-insufficient funding. A separate bill aimed at making that money permanent is also working its way through the legislative process.
While helping struggling school districts stave off cuts once united legislators across the spectrum — culminating in last year’s landmark overrides of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of baseline education funding — that unity seems to have evaporated.
Instead, the more traditional Republican opposition to education funding, couched in complaints about school performance, seemed to be the unifying argument.
“I don’t think we’re doing any better. I think our grades still are not so good. Last year we had a significant increase to the base of the BSA. Have we seen any results from that? No,” said Republican Rep. Steve St. Clair, who was appointed to the position by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, while introducing the amendment. “We just keep throwing money at a problem without identifying the core issue. We’ve been using one-time increments on education to prop up the education system, a system that’s broken.”
The amendment mirrors one that Eagle River Republican Rep. Jamie Allard introduced last week, where she argued that the litany of school closures across the state is, in fact, a good thing that reflects changing attitudes about education.
St. Clair and several other Republicans echoed that sentiment on Wednesday.
“Some of them should have been closed a long time ago, but we keep hanging on,” he said. “We keep using these one time increment education funding to prop it up. Well, we need to stop the speculation that X amount of schools are going to close, X amount of teachers are going to be gone. That’s purely speculation. It’s not really a hard-and-fast argument.”
St. Clair also echoed many of the talking points from Gov. Dunleavy’s education agenda, denigrating schools while elevating “parental choice” and home school programs that are accused of funneling money into private and religious schools.
“You’re not getting any more money until we get some reforms on policy,” St. Clair said during the debate, outlining “reforms” that largely translated to sharply increasing funding for only for home school students.
The actual situation is a little more concrete than he made it out to be, with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District voting on Monday to close four schools, eliminate librarians and defund their pool system. Similar stories are being heard throughout the state, with more closures slated in the Mat-Su Borough, Anchorage, Ketchikan and other communities.
Anchorage Democratic Rep. Zack Fields spoke against the cuts, arguing that the impacts are, in fact, very clear because school districts are already well underway with finalizing their budgets without any additional funding from the state.
“If this amendment is adopted, we will see 300 teachers laid off in my district in Anchorage. We will create a school system where no parent could look themselves in the mirror and say, I feel responsible sending my kids to school,” he said.
While another year of school closures seemed to register on Republicans’ radars, they seem to be more resigned to them as a fact of life.
Rep. Justin Ruffridge, a Soldotna Republican who was at one time considered to be a moderate, said the meeting where the closures were approved was “excruciating, horrible. It was a horrible meeting,” but that he also opposed increasing the funding on a one-time basis, noting that the schools were likely destined to close one way or another.
Ruffridge and some other Republicans argued that funding should be part of a larger discussion that makes the funding permanent — one that likely includes a sharp boost for homeschool students, like his children. Other Republican legislators said they could support one-time money if it were for a specific purpose.
House Minority Leader Delena Johnson suggested they consider $10 million that could only be used for energy costs, rather than the $158 million that local school districts would use, noting that the war in Iran has caused energy prices to spiral out of control. While St. Clair accepted that change to his amendment, which would have eliminated the funding and replaced it with $10 million in targeted funding, he didn’t seem particularly enthused by the change.
The effort ultimately failed on an 18-22 vote.
The funding contained in the operating budget is still a long way from becoming a reality. The Senate will also have an opportunity to craft its own budget, and any changes will have to survive Gov. Dunleavy’s veto pen. And, judging by the comments on Wednesday, there likely won’t be the votes to override him this time around.
Budget amendments are set to continue today.
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.
