If you don’t like school closures or oversized classes, you can blame 10 legislators in particular. They ignored Judge Sharon Gleason’s 2007 rulings that denying children the chance to meet the state’s standards is illegal and that the Legislature is responsible for schools’ shortcomings. Instead, these 10 voted in both January and March 2024 to keep the governor’s vetoes that shortchanged students.
Those returning legislators are: Sen. Mike Cronk and Reps. Jamie Allard, Julie Coulombe, DeLena Johnson, Kevin McCabe, Mike Prax, Dan Saddler, Cathy Tilton, Frank Tomaszewski and Sarah Vance. Take, for example, Rep.
Coulombe’s four elementary schools on the Lower Hillside, which have 53 homerooms. After the budget vetoes, most were jammed with 25 to 29 students apiece. As a result, more than 800 kids in Rep. Coulombe’s schools, which were starved for teachers, did not meet the state’s reading and math standards at third grade and beyond last spring.
— Mike Bronson
Anchorage
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