A group of state legislators tasked with charting the future of public school funding in Alaska is calling for further study of the subject.
The Legislature’s Task Force on Education Funding was set up as part of a deal to win Republican support for a school funding boost lawmakers overcame a veto to pass last year. The group put out the first public draft Monday of a nine-page document outlining its recommendations.
For a report on funding, it is light on numbers — for instance, it doesn’t recommend boosting state funding by a particular amount, nor does it outline specific changes to the formula that determines how much money the state provides to school districts.
Instead, it starts with defining what it means to provide an “adequate education” as guaranteed by the state Constitution. Students should have a safe learning environment, qualified teachers, well-maintained facilities, opportunities for extracurricular activities, and, of course, take classes that meet state standards, the report recommends. In the 2024-2025 school year, state data shows just about a third of students met grade-level proficiency standards in English, math and science.
“Sufficient state aid must be given to all districts to ensure all students have the opportunity for an adequate education as defined above,” the report states.
The report then recommends an independent “adequacy study” of the state’s school funding formula to see what should be tweaked in order to help students meet state standards, said Sen. Löki Tobin, an Anchorage Democrat who co-chaired the task force.
“Until we know if we're adequately funding our schools, which that adequacy study will be able to enumerate for us, we don't know if students have an opportunity to achieve proficiency,” Tobin said.
Lawmakers should set aside $500,000 as soon as possible to contract with “a national expert or experts” to produce the study in collaboration with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, the co-chairs wrote in a letter detailing the request.
Lawmakers budgeted $400,000 to conduct such a study this year, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it from the budget.
The report also issues a number of other recommendations, including creating a separate funding formula focused on school maintenance and reevaluating the process under which schools apply to the state for repairs and upgrades. It also calls for legislators to fund an energy relief program for schools rolled out this year, and to pass legislation proposed by Juneau Democratic Rep. Andi Story this year that would average student counts over a three-year period to smooth out year-to-year changes in school budgets.
One of the two minority Republicans on the six-member task force, Soldotna Rep. Justin Ruffridge, said the report did not represent a consensus. He took issue with the report’s recommendation to conduct a study before proposing changes to the formula.
“That is really the opposite of the route I had hoped we would go,” he said.
Ruffridge said “most people would agree” that Alaskans want smaller class sizes, better-maintained buildings and access to extracurricular activities like art and music.
“I wanted to take that education foundation formula kind of back to the bare bones, and then build it back again with … more cognition of what those dollars are actually being used for,” Ruffridge said.
Ruffridge also objected to a portion of the report dealing with correspondence education that declares, “for most students, in-person learning significantly outperforms online and distance learning.” Ruffridge said that was “bold and misdirected” and said he would recommend deleting the language from the final document.
“There's room in Alaska for all three of our public education options, and we have to figure out what the right way to fund those is going to be. And correspondence has to be a part of that,” he said. “If we're pitting one against each other in the funding task force recommendations, we might have missed the mark.”
Ruffridge said he hoped the final report would also address open enrollment — the practice of allowing students who live in one district to enroll in another district’s schools. Open enrollment was one of the six topics the task force was charged with studying, but the draft report issues no recommendations on the subject. Existing rules already allow students in Wasilla, for instance, to enroll in an Anchorage School District school, Tobin said.
“We believe that the current system is adequate,” Tobin said.
Current law allows students to enroll in any school in their home district, subject to capacity constraints. Schools outside a student’s home municipality can charge tuition, according to state regulations.
The task force plans to take public comment on the recommendations from around the state at a 10-hour hearing scheduled for Thursday. The group plans to submit its final recommendations before the next Legislature is sworn in in January.
