The Alaska Senate Majority has made education funding a priority for this year’s legislative session as schools grapple with what years of an unchanged base student funding formula and inflation mean for their future.
Today, the Senate Majority announced what senators say is a “bold” approach to education funding that not only seeks to make districts whole against inflation but aims to put additional resources into schools. The proposed increase, contained in Senate Bill 52, would increase the state’s base student allocation by $1,000 to $6,960 or about $257 million statewide.
The base student allocation (BSA) is part of the state’s funding formula that gets adjusted to account for regional costs and the needs of students, so the $1,000 increase will mean varying increases depending on the district and its students.
“We arrived at this number because we want to take a bold approach, a bold step,” said Anchorage Democratic Sen. Löki Tobin, the chair of the Senate Education Committee, during the Senate Majority’s weekly news conference today. “We heard from many of our stakeholders in testimony that $860 was the minimum, and we didn’t want to just help stop the bleeding, we wanted to actually put resources into our schools. This is the beginning of the conversation, so we’re going to have more public testimony opportunities and more invited testimony to hear from our education stakeholders about whether this is the right number to land on.”
The committee has taken several days of public testimony from teachers, education advocates, school districts and the general public, which has been heavily in favor of increased education funding. They’ve talked about large class sizes, eliminated programs, closing schools and a revolving door of teachers due to noncompetitive pay and a uncertain retirement program.
Sen. Tobin and several other senators expressed support for additional steps to help schools, such as the possibility of linking public education funding to inflation and providing assistance in other areas such as transportation and health care costs.
“This is the beginning of the beginning,” said Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak.
While some legislators have suggested tying education funding to school performance, senators today did not seem particularly eager to link school funding to student performance and test scores. Tobin noted that they have already passed an accountability in last year’s Alaska Reads Act, which contained a $30 increase to the base student allocation.
“We didn’t fund it as well as we should have,” Tobin, who worked on the legislation as a legislative aide, said.
With a price tag of nearly $257 million, according to a presentation by the Legislative Finance Division, and a projected deficit of $300 million in Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget, Senate Finance Committee co-chair Sen. Bert Stedman said it’ll require tough discussions. He put the spotlight on Dunleavy’s proposal to pay out a statutory dividend and its cost of about $2.5 billion, which is by far the largest single budget line in the budget and more than twice what education currently costs.
“If we had a $1,300 dividend, we could pay for the education increase, we could pay for the deficit and we could pay off all the municipal debt for the entire state for municipalities dealing with the Alaska Bond Bank, about $900 million, with this year’s cash flow,” he said. “That’s the magnitude of what we have to give and take when we decide what we’re actually going to fund.”
He later added that the cost of the dividend should force tough questions about the state’s future.
“We’re going to have to make a choice. Do we want to teach our kids to cash checks?” Stedman asked. “Or do we want to teach them to read and write and do arithmetic?”
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.
