School districts around Alaska are bracing for another year of deep cuts, a year after state lawmakers overcame two vetoes to increase funding for public schools.
Last year’s $700 boost to the base student allocation followed years of pleas from families, teachers and local officials who said the state’s public school system was at a breaking point.
But this year, the school district in Alaska’s fastest-growing region could close three schools — and even that won’t fully fill the $22.5 million hole in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District’s budget.
So, what gives?
“The actual boost to the BSA was about $20,” Mat-Su Superintendent Randy Traini said in an interview.
In prior years, without enough support to change the base student allocation in the funding formula itself, Alaska lawmakers instead included one-time funding for schools — most recently, in 2024, the equivalent of $680 per student.
So for Traini’s district, the BSA bump translated to an extra $20 per student over what it had received the year before — $700,000 for the whole Mat-Su, he said.
“$700,000 in a budget of more than a quarter of a billion is essentially flat funding, and flat funding is a cut” after accounting for inflation, he said.
Traini said he’s glad the Legislature increased the formula — it made education funding less ad-hoc and more predictable.
But districts across the state are still in crisis, he said.
“It's every school district,” he said. “All the school districts are facing a revenue problem.”
Nearly 80% of school districts across the state are facing a deficit, according to a survey from the the Alaska Council of School Administrators. School districts in Kenai and Juneau are reckoning with multimillion-dollar deficits. Even the tiny, remote community of Galena, which hosts the state’s largest correspondence homeschool program, is facing a large deficit and considering closing a school, its superintendent said by email. Kodiak’s superintendent told lawmakers her district needs a million dollars in cuts to balance its budget.
The state’s biggest school district, in Anchorage, is cutting hundreds of teachers and closing three schools — and projecting tens of millions more in cuts next year.
They all cite the same reason: inadequate funding from the state.
Anchorage parent Francis McLaughlin told the House Education Committee the lack of funding has pushed class sizes up to unacceptable highs. His family is contemplating a move to Washington as a result, he said.
“My younger daughter, Alice, will have 34 classmates in her fifth grade next year,” he said. “You need to raise the base student allocation, or else you'll force me and every parent like me who can buy a plane ticket (to) move away.”
Plenty already have. In the 2024-2025 school year, enrollment across the state hit its lowest level since 1998, according to state education department records, and state officials say they’re expecting a further decline next year.
But Traini there’s more to the budget crisis than declining enrollment and rising costs for things like fuel and electricity.
For his district especially, there’s another important factor at play.
‘Choice costs money’
The Mat-Su has embraced programs championed by the school choice movement, such as charter schools. Students can attend any district school they’d like on a space-available basis, and the district offers a number of programs that allow families to customize their child’s education.
Those options are popular — they keep students in the district and have helped improve test scores, Traini said.
“The difficulty is, choice costs money,” Traini said.
Put another way, the more individualized a school district’s offerings are, the less it can take advantage of a key traditional upside for public schools: economies of scale.
For example, the Mat-Su offers what Traini called “district-wide” high school courses. They’re primarily career and technical classes — welding is a popular one, he said.
Those district-wide courses give students options they wouldn’t have at a neighborhood school. But it also costs money to get students from Point A to Point B.
“So now we're spending more resources to support these choices that are wildly popular and they're good for kids,” he said. “But choice costs money.”
For now, Traini is asking the Mat-Su borough assembly to make up some of the gap. But for districts outside organized boroughs, that’s not an option: The state is the only entity responsible for funding schools in so-called Rural Educational Attendance Areas, or REAAs.
Rod Morrison leads the Southeast Island School District, an REAA that consists of seven schools on Prince of Wales Island and one on the southern tip of Baranof Island. Some schools have a single K-12 teacher. Some others split it between two teachers, Morrison said. One principal serves all eight campuses, he said.
“They say, cut the fat. We don't have any fat to cut. We have a hard time making payroll month to month,” Morrison said in an interview.
And inflation is magnified in remote communities like his, where most food, fuel and materials have to come by plane or boat, he said.
An ongoing push to raise funding with an unclear outlook
This year, just as in years past, Alaskans have spent hours and hours pleading with lawmakers to boost school funding. And they’ve found support in some corners. The chairs of the House and Senate Education Committees have filed a variety of bills that would provide more funding, either by increasing the base student allocation or making other changes aimed at easing the pressure on school district budgets.
But this year, unlike last year, key lawmakers say the state just can’t afford to commit to a long-term increase in funding for education — or, really anything — without some source of new revenue to address a long-running deficit in the state budget.
Despite a massive projected increase in state oil revenues linked to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, members of the Senate’s Democrat-heavy bipartisan majority coalition, especially its chief budgeters, have repeatedly stressed they’re not willing to increase the state’s long-term spending without a corresponding increase in revenue — though some have said they’re willing to use a portion of the potential windfall to catch up on much-needed maintenance.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, meanwhile, has said repeatedly that revenue-raising measures are a non-starter without a package of spending control reforms that stand little chance of passing the Legislature.
This year’s legislative session is only halfway over, and a lot can change in a short time — the Iran war has already scrambled politics as lawmakers consider a budget bill.
But for now, even supportive lawmakers aren’t offering any guarantees that schools will see more funding next year — not even $20.
