Alaska's schools are bleeding red ink.
The University of Alaska has said it will reorganize its campuses and might have to cut more than 8 percent of the staff, but professors are already heading for the exits. The state's largest public school district, here in Anchorage, is cutting 49 teaching positions and increasing class sizes. And in tiny rural schools like Nightmute — which has 80 students in a village of about 300 people — pain has almost reached the point of paralysis: Five of the school's six teachers are leaving at the end of the school year.
The most troubling part, teachers, professors and administrators across the state said, is that things could get much worse — not least for morale.
"At every one of our campuses, something is likely to go away," said James R. Johnsen, the president of the University of Alaska. "And if every campus is losing something, then every campus has a constituency that is aggrieved."
Some other school systems and universities around the country — like in Milwaukee and Baton Rouge, Louisiana — are also struggling with new budget cuts, or with old ones lingering from the recession. The problem up here, though, is oil, and the taxes on it that Alaska collects to pay for most state expenditures.
Drillers are pumping less, and at around $40 a barrel, the state is collecting less in taxes on the barrels that are pumped, making for a state budget crater of crisis proportions. The Republican-controlled Legislature has so far been loath to consider new taxes in an election year, and education, along with health and welfare, accounts for about two-thirds of the state budget.
The deeper story, educators and state officials said, is that a long-delayed day of reckoning over education policies and promises made in a different era, under different circumstances, has arrived.
In the mid-1970s, for example, when memories of the bleak and barren boarding schools for rural tribal people were still fresh, Alaska declared that it would equalize the differences between rich districts and poor ones. Fairness and equity, the state said, would be the rule. Oil money allowed that promise to be kept, with the state paying almost $60,000 per year, per pupil, to educate students in some of the country's most remote and isolated public schools.
The University of Alaska, gifted with a flood of oil money and federal research grants — which have also been in retreat — embarked on a path of ambition that included new academic disciplines. As enrollment grew to nearly 29,000 students, the school built scores of buildings across three major campuses — in urban centers like Anchorage and Fairbanks, and in rural spots off the road system where the costs for heating fuel and supplies, all of which have to be delivered by airplane, can be absurdly high.
In 2006, when the stock market was near its peak before the Great Recession, Alaska also shifted its teacher retirement system for new hires, from guaranteed pensions to self-directed plans similar to a 401(k). Then, to make the idea more attractive, it made benefits portable, meaning that teachers vested in plans could quit and not lose money that they, or the state, had put in. The result, as tough times have walloped the schools, is a flood of resignations, and teachers heading south with Alaska money in their pockets, looking for new starts somewhere else.
"It's gotten harder to get teachers to come here, and very hard to get them to stay," said Kameron H. Perez-Verdia, the president of the Anchorage School District.
With no agreement in sight on how to fix the $3.5 billion state revenue rupture from the oil collapse — which has erased about two-thirds of the state budget — educators said rumors and speculation from Juneau, the capital, are only making things worse.
Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, has proposed restoring the state's personal income tax, which was repealed in 1980 after the oil gusher hit, and raising many other taxes as well, from alcohol to gasoline.
And while Walker's plan also included deep cuts in spending for education, some legislative proposals are even more drastic. One lawmaker proposed closing dozens of the smallest rural schools. Others have said the university should retreat from its expensive research function and become more like a community college system, focused on teaching. A proposal to cut back on subsidies for high-speed Internet in rural parts of the state sent another shiver through the education system, since about 90 percent of University of Alaska students take at least one course remotely.
"It would set us back 10 years," said Linda Ady, the library director in Pelican, an island community of 110 people in Southeast Alaska, where good cell phone service is available only if you climb a mountain, and high-speed Internet at the library is the main link for people doing university course work or connecting with the wider world.
Making matters worse is that Alaska's economic cycle is profoundly out of step with the rest of the nation. During the depths of the recession in 2008 and 2009, Alaska was barely scathed because oil revenues held steady. So it could — and did — happily entice teachers to come north for the pay, or the adventure, or both. Now the tables have been turned, and states like Oregon, Nevada and Arizona have said that with better economic times, they are hiring teachers again.
"We're losing faculty. They're getting poached," said Brian M. Barnes, a professor and the director of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where 10 of the 45 faculty members in the department have already left. "Adding insult to injury is that they come back for research, now working for somebody else," he added.
Stories of teacher departures are varied, and often anguished and conflicted.
Amanda Barrett, 24, who came to Nightmute in Western Alaska last August for her first teaching job, said she was returning home to New Jersey when the school year ended to look for work there or in Pennsylvania. The reasons, she said, are personal, and no reflection on her school or village. But the cultural shock of Bush Alaska in winter, off the road system, was also no small thing, she said.
Frank von Hippel, a professor of biology at the University of Alaska, recently accepted a job as a professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, which is paying the costs of moving his lab and giving him a raise. He said the unsettled budget climate prompted him to look around, and when he did, the offer was great.
"Part of the problem up here is the uncertainty," von Hippel said. "It's not only the declining budgets, but no clarity on where we're going to end up."
Some state lawmakers said that Alaska's education system, in the fat financial years, rarely had to restrain the impulse to provide a new service, add a new job or build a new building, and that going back to a core mission could be positive.
"You just can't do everything, and that, in my opinion, is what they have tried to do," said Tammie Wilson, a Republican who chairs the subcommittee in the Alaska House of Representatives that oversees the University of Alaska's budget. "They can't keep doing business the way they have," she said.
Johnsen, the university president, said he completely agreed with that position and has envisioned a way forward that would consolidate strengths — and notably reduce administrative overhead — at the school's three main accredited campuses, in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau.
He said the troubles in Alaska's oil are also a signal that the state's economy is shifting into a new era, and that the education system must be a part of the answer in training people for that next economic chapter.
But with fewer high school graduates in Alaska continuing directly to college than in almost any other state in the nation, partly because well-paying blue-collar jobs have been so abundant, there are also fewer traditions around education to support it or sustain it, or to push lawmakers to fund it. The inevitable reality for now, Johnsen said, is that there will be blood.
"We've got to bring out the sharp knives," he said.