A reorganized Anchorage School Board unanimously passed a budget amendment Monday that cut nearly $15.7 million from the 2015-16 school year budget, removing funding for 60 teaching positions and other staff, supplies and programs.
Ed Graff, Anchorage School District superintendent, presented the proposed budget amendment at a press conference last week. In response to proposed education funding cuts by the Alaska Legislature, Graff's amendment stripped nearly $16.7 million from a previously approved budget that was padded with $17 million from the School District's reserves and added about 64 new teaching positions next school year.
On Monday, the School Board voted to slightly soften that reduction. The board added $1 million to Graff's proposal to fund 10 of 14 early literacy classroom teachers that had been slated for elimination.
School Board member Tam Agosti-Gisler presented the amendment. It pulled the $1 million from a Charter School Facility Fund, which the board had created in December. The $1 million fund served as a pool that charter schools could borrow from to help cover building costs.
Mark Foster, School District chief financial officer, said that while no charter schools had submitted formal applications to use the fund, two schools had made informal inquiries. He cautioned that passing the amendment would be short notice.
But Agosti-Gisler said that at only $1 million, the fund would not have been enough to seriously help charter schools. She said the funding for the early literacy classroom teachers was an immediate need and necessary to keep class sizes down. The change to the budget amendment passed unanimously.
"These are people and these are jobs and these are lives, right now," Agosti-Gisler said.
The budget amendment was the first big vote by the newest incarnation of the Anchorage School Board. Members Agosti-Gisler and Kathleen Plunkett were sworn in Monday for their second and third terms, respectively, after Anchorage voters re-elected them in April's municipal election.
Elisa Snelling, new to the board, was also sworn in. The Bartlett High graduate, accounting manager and mother of three is serving on the seat previously filled by Natasha von Imhof, who did not seek re-election.
The board also made its annual leadership selections at a meeting late last month. Each term spans one year. Kameron Perez-Verdia is the School Board's new president, a role previously filled by Eric Croft, who will continue to serve on the board.
Plunkett has taken over the role of vice president. Agosti-Gisler is the new clerk, and Bettye Davis will continue as treasurer for the board that governs Alaska's largest school district.
With Monday's vote, the School District's 2015-16 budget totals roughly $768.6 million. The budget amendment eliminates funding for four pre-kindergarten classrooms and their four teachers and four teacher assistants. Six of those positions are currently filled, said Heidi Embley, School District spokesperson.
Among other cuts, the amendment also removes funding for 12 early literacy coaches, four other early literacy classroom teachers and three maintenance staff -- all also filled positions.
Elective middle school teachers will not get back their team planning time that the board had added into next year's budget. Along with that, funding was removed for 20 new middle school teaching positions that had not yet been filled.
Another 20 new teaching positions across the School District were eliminated, along with 1.5 new positions to develop world language programs, Embley said.
The School District's charter schools will lose nearly $840,000 next school year. Funding for new staff computers and supplies was also reduced as well as budgets for administrative departments, including Business Management, Information Technology and Communications and Publications.
Graff has said he based the budget amendment on the elimination of one-time grant money and a 1.4 percent reduction to per-pupil state funding -- all of which could still change. If it does, the School Board will again alter the budget, Perez-Verdia said.
"We're operating in the dark," said School Board member Pat Higgins. "We have been. We go through this process over and over and over again."
The School District must notify tenured teachers of layoffs before May 15. Non-tenured teachers must be notified on or before the last day of the school term, Embley said. She said the School District would not know how many teachers and staff it would layoff until it went through the staffing process -- moving people around and working through seniority. This will be done over the next several days, she said.