OPINION: Education bill provides a path forward for Anchorage schools

The winter of the 2011-12 school year marked a regular but no less critical moment in the Anchorage School District’s annual budgeting cycle: It was time to allocate staff and resources for the coming school year. But mired in a second year of an unchanged Base Student Allocation and sensing no changes coming from Juneau (indeed, districts wouldn’t see another BSA increase until July 1, 2014), then-Superintendent Carol Comeau released a two-page explanation of ASD’s fiscal year 2013 budgeting dilemma:

“The … timeline requires the district to forward a balanced budget to the Anchorage Assembly in March, long before state education funding for the year has been considered. This, tied with inflation, requires budget cuts every year. Once the budget is approved by the Assembly, the district then waits until the Legislature and the governor complete their work to determine the level of education funding. If the state provides for increased costs, the district then revises its budget and reinstates as many effective programs and positions as possible. The district must then return to the local assembly for authority to spend the funds. This inefficient and time-consuming process directly affects our students, employees and community. Knowing even just one year in advance what the funding will be allows our district and others to make thoughtful, planned decisions. Education needs predictable, sufficient funding.”

Comeau had shepherded the Anchorage School District through the state’s historic three-year reinvestment in public education spanning the 2004-05 and 2006-07 school years as well as three predictable, inflation-adjusted funding increases between 2008-09 and 2010-11. These were years in which Alaska’s students demonstrated greater improvements in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math than at any other time during the past two decades. But because the Legislature never permanently resolved how to ensure that districts could craft budgets based on predictable, stable, and inflation-adjusted funding during her tenure, her last years as ASD’s leader were shaped by the District’s receipt of unpredictable, one-time funds.

Since Comeau’s tenure, subsequent superintendents and Boards have wrestled with the same problem, albeit at a larger scale. Over the past seven and a half years, nearly static per-pupil revenue provided through the State’s Foundation Formula has failed to keep pace with a 28% rate of inflation since the Base Student Allocation was last meaningfully adjusted in July 2016. During this time, the district’s purchasing power has decreased, the Municipality’s share of its statutorily required contribution to ASD’s budget has increased, and the district’s inability to pay employees competitive wages has contributed to dire shortfalls in key staffing areas.

On Tuesday night, the Anchorage School Board broke with the inefficient tradition that had so frustrated Superintendent Comeau. Instead of allowing approximately 71 teachers and counselors to be terminated or displaced in the fiscal 2025 budget adoption cycle — a decision which would have diminished educational opportunities districtwide, hindered School Board goals for student learning and quite likely escalated rates of teacher turnover and families’ outmigration — the board voted to increase the Municipal upper limit of ASD’s FY 25 budget by more than $8.7 million and to direct to those funds to classrooms and counseling offices across the district.

The board’s refusal to gut public education would not have been possible without the Alaska Legislature’s near-unanimous passage of Senate Bill 140, the board’s authorization of $6 million in administrative reductions for the 2024-25 school year, or its sobering but necessary decision to rely on historic levels of staff vacancies and attrition to mitigate the bulk of next year’s $98 million deficit.

Its action, however, demonstrated alignment with the Alaska Legislature’s clear intent for districts to be able to improve students’ educational outcomes. The board’s decision also demonstrated its staunch commitment to aligning available resources with its goals to improve third-grade reading proficiency, eighth-grade math proficiency, and students’ college or career, and life readiness.

Because we share the governor’s vision for improved reading outcomes, we cannot overemphasize how his approval of SB 140 would help ASD accelerate the K-3 growth which will be the means to increasing third graders’ overall reading proficiency. This fall, the state’s new reading screener flagged 14% more of ASD’s kindergarten students as having entered school scoring in the “well below benchmark” category for reading than what was typical nationally. Casting a wider net, nearly 75% of ASD’s entering kindergarteners were assessed as “well below” or “below” benchmark in reading.

But a comparison of the same fall assessment snapshot across K-3 grade levels reveals a significant distinction between ASD and its counterparts nationwide: While national data show an average decrease of 13 percentage points in the percentage of students assessed as “well below benchmark” from kindergarten to third grade, ASD stands out as having reduced the percentage of its students in this high-risk category by more than 31 percentage points across these grade levels. At the other end of the spectrum, while districts nationwide increased the percentage of strong readers (students assessed as “well above” benchmark) by only four percentage points between kindergarten and third grade, ASD increased the percentage of its students in this category by more than 20 percentage points. We believe that SB 140 is poised to accelerate ASD’s demonstrated capacity for growth.

Should Gov. Mike Dunleavy allow SB 140 to take effect, the historic, bipartisan compromise supported by 93% of legislators would amend key statutes relating to K-12 education, help retain educators, and address rampant rates of inflation for which other areas of State government (like Public Safety, the Department of Corrections, and the governor’s office itself) have all been compensated. We think it would make Comeau — and each of her successors — proud.

What happens next with SB 140 is not in the Anchorage School Board’s court. The community is urged to share their support for the bill with Dunleavy and their legislators over the coming days. Whatever happens, our unanimously adopted amendment to ASD’s fiscal 2025 budget explains that, “It is the board’s intent to reconvene on or before June 30, 2024, and adopt a specific plan for allocating the full funding stipulated by new and amended provisions approved in SB 140 and funded via the state of Alaska’s fiscal 2025 operating budget, so as to align all available resources with the District’s instructional and fiduciary needs.”

Margo Bellamy, Carl Jacobs, and Kelly Lessens serve as president, vice president and treasurer on the Anchorage School Board and co-sponsored the Board’s unanimously-adopted fiscal 2025 budget amendment. This article reflects their individual opinions and does not necessarily speak for the Board as a whole.

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