When legislators failed to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a $1,000 increase to the state’s per-student funding formula last week, it looked like any hope of securing a permanent increase to education funding this year was toast.
But a lot can change in a weekend.
On Monday, the Senate approved a $700 increase to baseline education funding with near-unanimous support thanks to a slate of changes negotiated over the weekend between a trio of Majority legislators and Republican freshman Sen. Robert Yundt. The legislation, House Bill 57, had started out as a bill to limit cellphones in schools but has since become the primary vehicle for school funding this year.
“It’s a good bill headed in the right direction,” said Senate Education Committee chair Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, and one of the key majority members behind the compromise.
The new version attempts to thread the needle between the competing concerns that doomed the education funding bill last week: Additional education policies and a way to pay for them. The biggest change is the inclusion of additional incentive funding for each student in grades kindergarten through sixth grade who is reading at or above grade level.
“It rewards kids and schools for making improvements in being at or above grade level. This is what we want. It incentivizes good behavior, it incentivizes growth,” Yundt said. “This is quite possibly the best thing today in regard to policy.”
However, the $450 per-student grant only comes into effect if there’s the money to pay for it. The bill contains contingency language requiring that another bill, Senate Bill 113, become law. That bill would extend the state’s corporate income tax to online businesses and is expected to raise about $65 million annually. It has passed the Senate and is currently in the House.
If there’s any surplus from that tax after the reading grants are paid out, the funding would flow to grants to help school districts operate career and technical education programs.
Several conservative Republicans who’ve groused about the education bills not containing policy changes or about the cost of the bill were won over by the amendment, even though they had misgivings about it being tied to a tax.
“It’s one of the ones that will move the needle,” said Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer. “It’s something that will help the students, and that’s something I’m all about.”
Other changes reached by Sen. Yundt and Majority Sens. Tobin, Jesse Bjorkman and Bill Wielechowski include directing an education funding task force to examine the open enrollment policy that the governor has requested and another that sets a guideline for maximum class sizes – 23 for K-6 students and 30 for everyone else – requiring districts to report back about any challenges meeting those guidelines.
It also strengthens the cellphone rules that emerged from the House. Where the House had softened the measure to just require districts to create a cellphone policy that could include banning cellphones, the measure passed by the Senate requires schools to ban cellphones unless the district passes a rule to opt out.
Still, minority Republicans ran a slate of their own amendments attempting to push conservative issues, such as a change that would allow students who opt out of the school day to also participate in extracurricular activities. Another would have required school districts to spend all the money they receive for intensive-needs students on them, but legislators pointed out that most districts are already spending more on intensive-needs students than they receive, and the measure would have resulted in a cut for most.
“I’m always looking for problems to solve, and I’m not aware of one here,” said Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau. “The problem that needs solving is we’re not putting enough resources into the whole enterprise.”
Still, despite the hurt feelings about their measures not getting any traction, most minority Republicans voted in favor of the measure, and it passed on a 19-1 vote. Only North Pole Republican Sen. Robert Myers, who was particularly opposed to tying the measure to a new tax, voted against it.
The measure went to the House on Monday but was kicked back to the Senate due to a drafting error. The Legislature is expected to resolve those issues on Wednesday, which would clear it to go to the governor with enough time to resolve any potential vetoes before the end of the 121-day session on May 21.
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.
