When the Alaska Legislature gavels back into session next week, the state of Alaska’s education system will be front and center as school districts across the state still face much of the same budget troubles they had last year.
In some cases, like in Juneau, where the district has been blindsided by accounting troubles, the financial situation has only grown more dire in the intervening months. Meanwhile, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his administration continues to oppose a permanent increase in school funding and spent much of the interim unilaterally imposing heavy-handed conservative policies on schools, such as the participation of trans students in sports and book access at libraries that have failed to garner traction in the Legislature.
In this breakdown, let’s look at where the Legislature left education policy last session, what’s happened since then and the outlook for the upcoming session.
Where the Legislature left schools
Public school funding was a major issue from the outset of the 2023 legislative session, with a full-court press from districts, school boards, teachers and families calling attention to the severe budgetary pinch created by years of flat funding and expiring pandemic money. While education funding is typically a deeply partisan issue — a place for Republicans to extract changes to education policy or micromanage district spending — the scope, scale and immediacy of the problem were so severe that several Republicans lent their support to a no-strings-attached boost to funding.
That ultimately resulted in an agreement for $174 million in one-time education funding — roughly equivalent to a $680 increase to the base student allocation, the figure used to determine how much funding each district is due based on their size, location and other factors — through the budget. Legislation that would have made that change permanent saw a last-minute push to the finish line but was stymied by Republican House leadership aligned with the governor.
Throughout last year’s push, Dunleavy was largely absent. He was more focused on a measure that largely mirrored Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would effectively bar teachers from talking about gender in the classroom by requiring written permission from parents and holding the threat of lawsuits over the districts and teachers. The governor’s few in-session gestures toward education funding included a bill that would have proposed paying teachers for sticking through a school year. When it was becoming apparent the Legislature was moving forward with a straightforward increase to education funding, his administration sowed confusion over whether the districts actually needed the money. That’s a point that has continued into the next budget, with the governor questioning whether districts’ financial situations are really as bad as they claim.
What’s happened since last session
Ultimately, the governor vetoed 50% of the $174 million for education funding.
Legislators who supported the funding were split on whether to try to hold an attempt at a budget override vote, but given that budget overrides require a three-quarter majority of legislators (higher than the margin for the education funding), no such vote was ever held.
The Legislature can give it a shot when they return to session—where they’d still face an uphill battle with that three-quarter majority vote—but what’s more likely is a new funding package advances through the budget or through a permanent change to the base student allocation.
The governor’s budget includes no additional funding for education in the next fiscal year, which will equate to a reduction of funding given the expiration of the one-time money added by the Legislature last year. At his budget announcement, the governor said he opposed a permanent increase to education funding in favor of a far smaller and far more prescriptive infusion of cash through his paying-teachers-to-stick-around proposal. That also included a jab at teacher unions — Dunleavy’s administration has not been exactly friendly with organized labor — suggesting that the program would once and for all settle the debate of whether teacher pay actually matters for teacher retention.
Meanwhile, the governor’s administration also killed a report on teacher pay by the state’s Department of Labor, eventually allowing it to see the light of day with a softer headline.
Even Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, who has previously advocated for permanent increases to school funding as a public school superintendent, has reversed course and now opposes such an increase, favoring much smaller increases to education funding.
The governor’s teacher pay proposal, for example, would pay teachers up to $15,000 for completing a year of teaching in the state with no requirements that they continue to teach in Alaska. In total, the program would put less than $60 million into schools over five years, a far cry from the yearly increase of $174 million that the Legislature has widely supported.
The outlook for the session
Sen. Löki Tobin, who has been at the leading edge of the Legislature’s education policy as the chair of the Senate Education Committee, told The Alaska Current in an interview last month that it’s important for legislators not to lose sight of the goal of improving student achievement and outcomes. While there have been a plethora of suggestions on this front — with conservatives largely focusing on initiatives that would funnel public school dollars to private and religious organizations — Tobin said the research is clear about what makes a difference: smaller class sizes and a stable teacher workforce.
She stressed, too, that the decision-making should ultimately left with locally elected school boards, arguing that it’s a more effective and equitable use of state resources.
“If the two things that we can do in the Legislature is decrease class size and improve teacher retention, we know we’ll get improvements in outcomes,” she said. “The most equitable thing we can do is increase the BSA, and that’s the focus going into the legislative session; we just have a laser focus on making sure that we walk out of this with the most fair and effective lever we can possibly do. That’s an increase to the BSA.”
Tobin predicted that education funding, in some form, will be a priority in the early days of the legislative session and said that unless things have significantly changed since last year, there are votes to make an increase to the BSA permanent. The Anchorage Democrat also recognized that there are many other pressing issues facing the state, such as its ongoing budget problems and workforce issues, but stressed that it shouldn’t discourage work on investing now.
“We, as government, are responsible for balancing all of this and juggling all the balls,” she said. “The belief that we can’t or that we shouldn’t or that we have to sacrifice some things to invest in others is a fallacy. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, and we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s critical and imperative that we get our fiscal house in order, put the state’s top priorities in front of ourselves, and think about how we are going to make sure that we do all of this for the betterment and effective outcomes to improve Alaskans’ lives.”
The legislative session is slated to start on Tuesday, Jan. 16 in Juneau.
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 Twitter.
