For the last eight years, the fight for education funding has largely been a stalemate between a growing coalition of lawmakers who argue the state is dangerously underfunding its schools and Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican who began his time in office by pushing for a 23% cut to public schools.
The gridlock has led to several vetoes of K-12 and early education funding, culminating in a landmark veto override that implemented a bare-minimum increase to catch up with years of inflation.
Now lawmakers are in for a sea change in the governor’s office.
Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, a former state legislator who often clashed with Dunleavy on public school funding, is on track to become the state’s first Democratic governor in two decades, according to VoteHub
With the House and Senate remaining under bipartisan coalition control following the election, a Kreiss-Tomkins win would put the governor and both legislative majorities on the same side of the school funding debate for the first time in eight years. Incoming House Speaker Calvin Schrage, an Anchorage independent, has named stable education funding as a top priority for the House coalition.
The shift has opened up a slew of new opportunities on issues that have languished under Dunleavy, with education high on the list.
“We’ve spent the last eight years with a governor who was adamantly opposed to adequately funding public schools,” Senate Education Committee chair Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, told The Alaska Current. “I’m looking forward to an incoming governor who is going to take a different approach.”
Tobin and other education advocates have long argued that investing in early education and public schools reduces problems later in life, like crime and addiction, that are costly to society and the state budget. They often point out that Alaska’s prison budget has been one of the few areas of consistent growth during Dunleavy’s time in office, a fact that frequently gets used to illustrate the state of education under the Republicans.
Kreiss-Tomkins has signaled support for increased funding, but has also warned that the state’s overall budget situation requires realism while maintaining a balanced budget.
“I think there are important areas where the state has underinvested, like public education,” Kreiss-Tomkins said at the Resource Development Council annual conference on Nov. 11, according to the Anchorage Daily News. However, he added, “it’s very important that we don’t zigzag in the other direction.”
Education funding task force
As for what’s next, lawmakers already have a blueprint for what education could look like in a post-Dunleavy world.
On Nov. 9, a special legislative working group released its recommendations for how to tackle education policy moving forward. The six-member group, created as part of last year’s school funding deal, is taking public comment through Dec. 8 and plans to deliver a final report when the new Legislature convenes in January.
The report calls for increased funding for public schools—specifically automatic inflation adjustments that Republicans like Dunleavy have opposed—and for restructuring how state funding accounts for facility and utility costs. The proposal would separate the costs of running a school from the costs of educating students, a move that could send extra funds to districts in high-cost parts of the state.
tHowever, not everyone from the working group is a fan of the plan. One of the group’s two Republicans, Soldotna Rep. Justin Ruffridge, told Alaska Public Media it didn’t reflect the group’s consensus. Like many other Republicans, he suggested education needs more studies before jumping to additional funding.
“That is really the opposite of the route I had hoped we would go,” he said. “I wanted to take that education foundation formula kind of back to the bare bones, and then build it back again with … more cognition of what those dollars are actually being used for.”
Why are rural schools at the center of the plan?
Tobin said over the task force’s 18 months, its members visited districts across the state and saw vastly different classroom conditions. Several rural schools lacked technology and other offerings common in urban schools and posed health and safety concerns—such as leaky pipes, mold and raw sewage—that urban students would rarely encounter.
An early 2026 visit to Mt. Edgecumbe, the state-run boarding school that serves mostly Alaska Native students from rural parts of the state and has many high-profile leaders among its alumni, found the once-prestigious school in “deplorable” condition, with leaky roofs, broken windows, ancient appliances and a resident rat named Tip Toes.
Dunleavy administration officials blamed the school’s condition on budget issues, but defended their decision not to request additional funding. Department of Education Commissioner Deena Bishop also described a cut to extracurricular offerings at the school—eliminating live-in AmeriCorps volunteers who could accompany students on field trips or travel to the state debate tournament— as an attempt to “right-size” the school.
Lawmakers moved to add additional money into the school, but school officials said some of the issues, such as their decision to save about $18,500 by not covering the costs for the AmeriCorps volunteers, couldn’t be reversed in time for the school year because the volunteers had all already been assigned.
Some students reported in October 2026 that the additional funding and attention has led to improvements on campus, but said that there were still trust issues between the state and students that need to be repaired.
Tobin said the situation at Mt. Edgecumbe and rural school districts illustrates the state’s long-running neglect of students living in its remote communities. While she acknowledged it may not be realistic to expect services to be identical across the state, she said the state needs to do a better job establishing a baseline expectation of what constitutes an adequate education.
To that end, the proposal includes a list outlining the state’s duty to educate students, provide a safe learning environment, maintain facilities and reflect their communities.
She said students shouldn’t have to worry about classrooms being heated or having internet connections that are fast enough for students to attend classes or take tests.
A simmering fight over homeschool allotments
The working group’s report focuses on traditional brick-and-mortar schools that serve most of Alaska’s students, with one portion explaining that “for most students, in-person learning significantly outperforms online and distance learning.” It’s a direct pushback to Dunleavy’s longtime fixation on funneling resources toward locally run public homeschool programs and public charter schools.
Dunleavy has argued that the state should invest in those programs, citing test results and personal anecdotes, as more effective than traditional brick-and-mortar schools. But what he often leaves out is that those programs are more selective—charter programs often require families to provide transportation, volunteer hours and, in some cases, meals—and typically serve wealthier, less-diverse cohorts of students.
Tobin said it’s a recipe for leaving students behind.
“(Dunleavy and his administration) didn’t seem to recognize and understand that a core constitutional responsibility is providing that system of public education that is open to all students,” Tobin said. “Whether they are students who want to learn or not is not the question. The question is: Is there opportunity for them to learn?”
But the inclusion in the report is a sore point for Ruffridge, whose children attend a private Christian school but use public homeschool funding to cover extracurriculars like dance and music lessons. He complained that scrutiny of the spending is “misdirected.”
“If we’re pitting one against each other in the funding task force recommendations, we might have missed the mark,” he said.
Tobin said her intention with the recommendations is that the state should have a better handle on whether the money it’s spending to educate kids is actually doing its job. She said the lack of testing in homeschool and correspondence students—nearly 90% opt out of state testing—leaves a major blind spot in understanding whether the programs are actually working.
“Parents might really like the program that they’re in. It doesn’t mean that their students are learning,” she said. “If I’m putting public dollars into a system of public schools, then I expect that those dollars to be well utilized to produce the young person (who is ready to succeed).”
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 newsletter on the Alaska Legislature, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky. Reach him at matt [at] thealaskacurrent.com.
