Schools around the state are struggling to keep their doors open. Administrators are planning to use increased funding to cover higher energy and insurance costs, add classroom teachers, prevent larger class sizes and raise teacher pay to aid recruitment.
At the end of February, the legislature passed SB140, a sweeping education bill, which includes a permanent increase in the per student funding for schools, called the base student allocation, or BSA. Within one day, Governor Mike Dunleavy summarily threatened to veto the bill if his priorities were not met. Amid the uncertainty, schools across the state are tentatively planning how they can use the funds to stay afloat and improve student outcomes if the bill moves forward. The Alaska Current reached out to several school districts to find out how they would use additional funding.
Yupiit School District Superintendent Scott Ballard — whose district serves just under 500 students at three schools in Akiachak, Akiak, and Tuluksak — says the BSA increase will allow them to provide teacher retention bonuses, pay for increased energy and health insurance costs, purchase a generator for one school, fund teacher training and add teachers and maintenance staff.
Eleven of those new positions would be for reading and math interventionists, who help struggling students catch up. They were forced to cut these positions after federal COVID-19 funding dried up, which has helped districts fill the gaps in their budgets for the past several years. They would also add five classroom aides and four maintenance positions to keep the schools in good repair.
Ballard said that with increased energy, insurance and maintenance costs, more funding was needed just to keep school doors open. He said that heating fuel costs for the district have increased by 40%, currently costing $900,000 per year, up from about $450,000 three years ago, and insurance costs are up 20%.
Ballard said the district doesn’t have the funding to keep the school buildings repaired and that the level of “deterioration of the facilities is significant and harmful.”
In addition to needed maintenance and repairs, new state fire safety regulations would cost the school district $200,000 to upgrade just one school — money they don’t have.
Ballard said that teachers and principals work 12 hours a day, six days a week. “It is discouraging when legislators don’t understand that there is no top-down heavy bureaucracy,” he stated. “I wish people could come out and see how hard the teachers work.”
The Yupiit School District is one of many rural school districts that are struggling to educate students in buildings in various states of disrepair – with mold, water damage and buckets collecting water from leaky roofs, without working fire alarm systems and in partially condemned buildings.
Schools in rural Alaska have been hit especially hard by nearly a decade of flat funding, and many are having to make choices between keeping a teacher or paying for increased fixed costs or much needed building repairs, Executive Director of the Coalition for Education Equity, Caroline Storm, said.
“Teachers aren’t getting the support they need, the facilities aren’t being maintained, and everyone will just be asked to do more,” she said. “If this funding gets vetoed I believe that there will be some districts that will be so far underwater that they won’t know what to do.”
According to Northwest Arctic Borough Assembly member Craig McConnell, this year’s one-time funding did not even cover the increase in heating fuel costs over the past year. An increase of $680 to the BSA would only just barely cover the $1.2 million increase in fuel costs for the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, which covers about 1,850 students across 11 villages.
Other schools in rural Alaska have plans to immediately direct funds back into the classroom and reverse teacher cuts.
Unalaska School District would be able to increase teacher pay to competitive levels, and begin rebuilding areas they’ve had to cut, including art, music, PE, internships, high school career pathways, as well as provide students with more emotional support.
In Nome, the proposed elimination of 10 – 11 classroom positions would be reversed. But, even with the full BSA increase, schools would need to make cuts in areas not related to staff positions.
The Lower Kuskokwim district, which has 28 rural schools spread across the Kuskokwim River Delta in Southwest Alaska, would use funding to reverse planned class size increases and cuts to schools throughout the district. They would be able to keep student programs that are currently on the chopping block, including a summer institute that teaches career skills like welding and computer science.
With federal COVID-19 funding gone or running out this year, large school districts like the Mat-Su Borough School District, Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and Anchorage School District are also facing huge deficits moving forward.
The Mat-Su Borough School district is grappling with a 37% increase in health insurance costs since 2015, making it their second largest expense at a cost of over $38 million per year.
As a part of this year’s budgeting, the Mat-Su school board calculated several budget forecasts through 2028. After years of flat funding, they predict that even a $1,000 permanent increase to the student base allocation would lead to a $31.4 million deficit by 2028. That number jumps to $72.3 million if everything stays the same and $57.7 million assuming one time funding of $340 each year. All scenarios they ran would require cuts to educational programs and services.
Kenai Peninsula Borough School District superintendent Clayton Holland said his district would use increased funding to hire more educators and reverse some of the deep cuts they would be forced to do without a BSA increase. The cuts currently on the table if Governor Dunleavy vetoes all or part of SB140 include raising student teacher ratios by as much as five students, cutting two or three teachers per building, cutting elementary school counselors and cutting athletic and theater programs.
Holland said that with nearly 80% of the district’s budget invested in the classroom and with many rural schools that can’t be closed because they are the only option in the communities they serve, the district would be forced to focus cuts primarily on staffing.
He said that unpredictable one-time funding and the stress of proposing cuts every year is contributing to an inability to hire and retain teachers and in turn, the larger issues of out-migration and the economy.
“Schools are tied to our economy,” Holland said. “The working people you need here to support the economy won’t stay here. It’s all tied together.”
