There are many factors contributing to Alaska’s chronically tight public school district budgets, but one of the big ones is an exodus of students — and their funding — to charter and homeschool programs run by school districts outside of their communities.
While lawmakers have been unwilling to clamp down on students attending programs outside their communities — a move that would likely place greater oversight on just how homeschool allotments are getting spent — the House on Tuesday approved a bill that at least attempts to address the symptom.
House Bill 261 by Rep. Andi Story, D-Juneau, would base the amount of funding each school district receives on a rolling average rather than basing it on a single year’s numbers. That means dips in enrollment won’t be felt as sharply or as quickly as they have been, which she argued would give districts time to adapt to changes without resorting to hastily slashing programs — something districts have done for several years.
“What I feel is hurting parents’ confidence in our system is our broken timeline process, our backward funding process. We actually are pitting families against each other, within our schools, about what programs are we going to not have or have, and that’s really hurting our student achievement,” she said during the floor debate. “I think it is really critical that we provide budget stability and allow for a smoothing of the enrollment numbers.”
The legislation would also increase funding for special needs students, limit the amount that local governments can contribute to schools to 2% of the area’s total property value (essentially shifting more costs to the state), and increase funding for the state’s reading assistance program and career training.
In total, the bill would deliver about $110 million more annually to school districts.
House Minority Republicans were split on the measure.
Several conservative Republicans parroted longstanding Republican talking points against funding schools, arguing that money doesn’t make a difference in the classroom. Others argued that urban school districts grappling with multimillion-dollar budget gaps are in a problem of their own making because they can’t keep up with the popularity of the lightly regulated homeschool and charter programs.
“Why are we trying to put a band-aid on a situation when we could be addressing the root cause? Parents are walking away from our brick and mortar public schools because they are not happy with what’s happening,” said Glenallen Republican Rep. Rebecca Schwanke. “We have a lot of reasons why parents are walking away from school districts. Could more money fix some of those reasons? Sure, we could fully fund the theater programs. We could fully fund the sports programs. Yeah, we could throw more money at some of those things, but there are other issues that are happening in our schools that we are just not willing to talk about and address with good policy.”
Rep. Sarah Vance, a Homer Republican who used a vigil for Charlie Kirk to launch a local private school associated with the slain bigot’s political organization, Turning Point USA, and used coverage of said vigil to silence a local newspaper reporter, agreed with Schwanke’s estimation. She said families are turning to alternative publicly funded schools because they offer more opportunities than the traditional brick-and-mortar schools (which, again, are grappling with ongoing budget problems).
“We have this mentality here, that if we just give them more money, that everything will be better,” she said, before conceding that one of the problems facing the current system is teacher pay. “A significant aspect of (a story about a local charter in her district) is that teachers left because they didn’t feel supported, they went and taught other homeschoolers and actually made more money and were able to have the flexibility that they needed and respect.”
However, most Republicans supported the idea.
Several said it was a sensible approach that returns some of the costs to run local school districts to the state, effectively lowering the growing tax burden on local communities. Others said it helped provide some key certainty for districts, hopefully lessening the need for disruptive pink-slip notices that occur during many budget years.
“This bill does give more certainty to the teachers there. They’re the ones that really are taking the hits here,” said North Pole Republican Rep. Mike Prax, who has long argued that K-12 funding should come entirely from the state rather than local property taxes.
He noted that some rural communities, like Rep. Schwanke’s, may have stable enrollment that allows them to avoid the pink-slip process and annual uncertainty, but that’s simply not the case for many larger districts with more transient populations.
“It works differently, at least in the Fairbanks North Star borough, there just is no certainty about funding education, and it can go on and on and on and on well past October, before it dies down,” he said, “and that makes it more difficult for teachers, if they stay on, to focus on their work, because there’s an ongoing debate.”
HB 261 passed the House 31-9.
The bill now heads to the Alaska Senate, which had been considering far more strict rules on homeschool and charter programs before shelving the idea due to pushback.
The legislative session is set to expire on Wednesday, May 20.
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.
