Alaska lawmakers introduce bill for major boost in school funding

High school students chant "Raise the BSA" outside the Capitol during a protest for increased public school funding on April 4, 2024. After Gov. Dunleavy vetoed a base student allocation increase last year, this year lawmakers have introduced legislation to boost school funding based on inflation rates. (Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon)
Education funding is back on the docket for the Alaska Legislature. On Friday, Independent Rep. Rebecca Himschoot of Sitka introduced legislation, House Bill 69, to substantially increase the amount of funding per student.
The two-page bill would increase the base student allocation, the core of the state's school funding formula.
The base student allocation is currently $5,960 for this school year.
If passed, the new legislation would boost the BSA by $1,000 next school year, as well as two increases of $404 each in the following two years.
In addition, the bill would adjust for inflation each year, based on the average consumer price index over the previous three years.
For next school year, the BSA would total $7,249, a 22% increase. By the 2027-2028 school year, it would reach an estimated $8,510, for a total increase of roughly 43% over three years.
Lawmakers say the boost will help address a major historical shortfall in funding. School costs rose by nearly 40% since 2011, while the BSA increased by only 10%, according to a statement Himschoot filed along with the bill.
'There's a huge gap there,' Himschoot said in a news conference Friday. 'All of us have noticed, and have heard from parents, from families, from school districts, that that gap is there. And it's causing huge, huge problems and taking opportunity away from our students. So this bill looks to correct that.'
House lawmakers also hope to address the state's teacher shortage. Vacancies have more than doubled since 2021, from 260 to 598 full-time certified teaching positions vacant this year, according to data provided by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. This year's state budget increased school funding by an amount equal to a $680 BSA increase, but did not make a permanent change to the formula.
'One-time funding is not effective,' said Democratic Rep. Andi Story of Juneau, who is co-chair of the House Education Committee with Himschoot. 'Many families … have seen too big of a churn by teaching staff, and a lot of that has to do with only one-time funding coming. So we know we need to make it permanent and this bill addresses that.'
Last year, Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bill to increase per-pupil spending, citing what he said was the need to address education policy issues, including teacher retention and provisions to support charter schools.
'Without a comprehensive plan to address the education issues of the state, simply increasing funding to the current system does nothing to increase the educational outcomes and potential of our youth,' Dunleavy said in a veto memo.
Legislators sought to override the veto, but the effort failed by one vote, resulting in the state enacting the one-time funding increase.
This year, lawmakers acknowledged there are major issues to address with rising district costs, particularly for transportation, heating and insurance costs, as well as declining school enrollment. Proponents of the bill aim to boost the base student allocation tied to inflation, on a continuous basis so school districts can address those deficits and plan for the future.
'It shifts the risk,' Rep. Himschoot said. 'The risks of inflation fall on districts right now, and it shifts that risk to the state.'
On Monday, the House education committee heard impassioned testimony from school officials, parents, and business, municipal and tribal leaders from around the state, in support of the funding boost.
'We have no health, no social-emotional learning, and no physical education curriculum. We have no in-person music, art or foreign language programs,' said Madeline Aguillard, superintendent of the Kuspuk School District in the middle Kuskokwim River region, detailing extensive budget cuts already made.
'We have extremely reduced academic programs. We have no in-person career and technical education courses. We have no advanced courses for students pushing to pursue higher education or technical fields. We haven't been able to adopt a social studies curriculum in the last decade,' she said.
'Some of these things can be provided online, and we do rely on a lot of online vendors,' she added. 'However, we lack the adequate technology to be able to even provide devices for all of our students.'
The legislation comes at a time when school districts across the state are facing major deficits and considering school consolidation and closures, including in Fairbanks, Kodiak, Ketchikan, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and Anchorage.
Steve Rowe, an Anchorage parent of three and owner of a general contracting company, testified to the committee that the cost of school funding is essential.
'I promise you, I scream 'budget' every day to about 50 different people, and to stay within it,' Rowe said. 'But I also can stand back and recognize at certain points, it doesn't matter what the budget is in certain sectors, we have to fund those no matter what the cost is, and if that means making it painful somewhere else, then so be it. That's just what we have to do. I believe education has to be one of those.'
Jenna Wright, president of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp., highlighted the economic costs of Alaska's current school issues.
'I have heard from more than one employer over the last year that has said they've lost a candidate because of perceptions about a lack of education system,' Wright said. 'So by underfunding education, we're losing families, workers and taxpayers to other states with better-funded schools. This is eroding our economic base and undermining our efforts to grow a robust economy.'
Alaska has a complicated formula for funding public schools for its approximately 131,000 students.
The base student allocation is just one part of the formula, which takes into account several factors, including the number of students enrolled, number of correspondence students, school sizes, location in urban or rural areas called district cost factor, career technical education and special needs students.
The state contributes about 62% of funding to school districts, along with municipal, federal and some grant funding. But how far that funding goes also depends on the district.
Alaska has 53 school districts across the state, and 34 of those are located in municipalities with tax revenue to contribute to schools.
There are 19 districts that are Regional Education Attendance Areas with no municipal government and no taxing power. 'So their only source of funding is the state or federal government,' said Alexei Painter, director of the Alaska Legislative Finance Division, which analyzes the budget for lawmakers. Painter provided an overview of the school funding formula in a presentation to the House Education Committee on Jan. 24.
Lawmakers in both the House and Senate have said that school funding is one of their main priorities this year.
Dunleavy has also said he plans to introduce legislation to increase school funding. His proposed budget in December reduced education funding by $213 million, since it did not continue with the one-time funding.
He said roughly $200 million in school funding could be added, if lawmakers can agree to certain changes in education policy.
Sen. Löki Tobin of Anchorage, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said she is planning to introduce school funding legislation in the Senate.
This week, the House Education Committee is holding public testimony on the proposed BSA increase legislation on Wednesday, Jan. 29, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Members of the public can call in:
From any location, at (844) 586 – 9085
From Juneau, at (907) 586 – 9085
From Anchorage, at (907) 563 -9085
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The Tea Purchaser's Guide; or, The Lady and Gentleman's Tea Table and Useful Companion, in the Knowledge and Choice of Teas, authored anonymously by 'A Friend to the Public,' could be considered a kind of 18th-century Wirecutter. Such compendia were created to avoid choosing according to 'fancy' or 'whim,' two vices that made their appearance in novels of the time, as did a new stock female character: the coquette. This was the woman who exercises her power to choose by browsing extensively but also withholding a decision. She teases. As Rosenfeld emphasizes throughout her history, such excesses were often projected onto women, who were accused of causing 'social and moral decay' through their frivolity and unexpected economic power. The shopping revolution was as significant as the more obvious political revolts that occurred around the same time. The philosophers of liberalism and the authors of new constitutions may have provided a language for talking about individual freedom, but it was the consumer's habit, in Rosenfeld's framing, that eventually trickled down and transformed political systems into expressions of personal preference. Because of the dangers of unhindered possibility, the expansion of choice came with guardrails, rules meant to stave off anarchy and social disorder. The use of dance cards at 19th-century balls—another of Rosenfeld's charmingly idiosyncratic examples—expanded women's agency in choosing a mate. The little booklets allowed a woman to create a menu of options, but they also precluded a free-for-all—it was highly improper, for example, to dance with the same partner for more than a waltz or two. With the introduction of the secret ballot, in the Yorkshire town of Pontrefract in 1872, choice idolatry conquered its last frontier: voting. No longer would elections be noisy, populous affairs in which candidates would treat voters to food and drink in a shared good time for all. No longer would political choice be the result of something like a public caucus, a ritual that mostly just codified already existing social alliances. The secret ballot began as an 'experiment,' as one local paper put it, in which one was to go 'alone and unbefriended to a compartment,' in the words of another, and indicate one's favored candidate. This solitary physical act soon became, Rosenfeld writes, 'what modern freedom is supposed to feel like.' The secret ballot became the most fundamental of rights in a democracy. Attention turned to the question of who should secure this right, and understandably so: Women and minority groups understood its power, even as an emblem (recall Afghan women in 2014 proudly raising their ink-stained fingers to indicate that they had taken part). Yet even before that first ballot was shoved into a box, some saw the shift from the communal act of voting, messy as it had been, to the purely individual as carrying its own problems. Writing in 1861, John Stuart Mill, a champion of liberalism, worried about what would be let loose in the secrecy of the voting booth, where an elector might be encouraged to 'use a public function for his own interests, pleasures or caprice.' Voters would think of their choices as a way 'to please themselves,' or as an expression of their 'personal interests, or class interest, or some mean feeling in his own mind.' The whole process, Mill argued, would move voting away from a referendum on a community's values and toward an act of whimsy, like browsing from an array of calico clothes. The 20th century only further solidified the idea of choice as the paramount freedom, which also meant shedding some of the guardrails of earlier eras. Many economists came to perceive an individual as the sum of their preferences, a choosing machine, Homo economicus, acting rationally and always maximizing the collective good through their own self-interest. The celebration of market-based individualism hit a peak when Milton Friedman's neoliberalism triumphed in the 1980s. Friedman once wrote that 'the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.' At the same time, paradoxically, the 20th century provided much reason for skepticism about how much control humans really have over their choices. Freud revealed the subterranean sources of our desires; advertisers manipulate our taste for breakfast cereals as well as presidents. In this century, at least to a behavioral psychologist such as the late Daniel Kahneman, even the question of free will seems unsettled. This insecurity is particularly glaring in a world of proliferating algorithms that serve us more of what they predict we will want and AIs that offer to do the thinking for us. If choice is the 'useless and exhausted idiom' that Rosenfeld suggests it might be by the end of her history, then maybe the concept is worth abandoning altogether. Doing so, she writes, would be akin to asking 'if we are done with capitalism and democracy and their special offspring, human rights'—if we are ready, that is, to throw out the dominant principle of the contemporary world. I don't think we are. But if choice has indeed become an end unto itself, absent a set of principles for actually making choices, then something has gone awry. Abortion rights is a telling test case. In the late 1960s, feminists began using the slogan 'My Body, My Choice' to argue for the legalization of abortion in order to make it seem to be a self-evident right: Americans would never stand in the way of freedom, and to be free was to have choices. But what is clearer now, after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, is that the pro-choice argument was fragile. It gave conservatives the chance to challenge the consumerist-sounding appeal to 'choice' with the more moral-sounding appeal of 'life.' But even more damning are critiques of this framing from the left. The decision to rely on 'choice,' Rosenfeld writes, made access to abortion 'solely a civil right, a right to fulfill individual desires without government interference, not a social or economic right framed in response to essential needs or a matter of social justice.' She explains that this made abortion seem like 'something for sale exclusively to those who had the resources—financial, familial, and psychological—to select it in a reproductive marketplace.' Is it possible to make an argument for abortion without resorting to choice idolatry? I began to hear an inkling of this possibility during the recent presidential campaign. Access to abortion was presented not as a matter of personal bodily autonomy but as a public-health concern. In one memorable speech, Michelle Obama painted a dire picture of what would happen to women if, because of abortion bans, they didn't get 'the care' they needed; to the male partners of these women, she said, 'You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.' Kamala Harris, in her one debate with Trump, also turned to images of medical distress—of 'pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room.' Rather than appealing to women's personal agency, Harris invoked other values: communal care and well-being. What I picked up in this tonal shift was a realization among liberals, conscious or not, that just arguing for having choices was not enough. It matters how you choose and what you choose. What matters is the moral choice in question, the stakes—in this case, what we value more: the health and happiness of the mother, or the existence of her fetus. This is a harder debate to have, and it demands making a more profound argument than one simply in favor of choice, but it is also more rewarding. In his 1946 lecture 'Existentialism Is a Humanism,' Jean-Paul Sartre compared making moral choices to 'the construction of a work of art.' The decisions you make at every juncture are what make you. This is as true of a person's life as it is of a society. 'Freedom could be reconfigured as the chance to do what one ought rather than simply what one desired,' Rosenfeld writes. Releasing ourselves from choice idolatry doesn't have to mean letting someone else—an imperial president, for instance—decide for us. It means separating good choices from bad, understanding these categories as the ones that matter, delineating them alongside our fellow citizens. This, rather than just being drunk on options, should be the sweet slog of modernity.