Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed an increase to school funding on Thursday, saying the bill was too expensive and didn’t include policies that he said would bolster school choice and improve student performance.
Instead, he proposed a smaller funding and policy package for schools.
It’s the latest development in a yearslong saga. Lawmakers and Dunleavy for years have struggled to come to terms on the state’s first substantial boost to long-term funding in nearly a decade.
Alaska Public Media spoke with school leaders from Ketchikan to Kotzebue on Friday to hear their thoughts on the news. Here’s what they had to say.
‘It’s our students that are going to lose out’
There were some themes.
“My reaction was, once again, disappointment,” Unalaska City School District Superintendent Kim Hansich said.
“I think frustration is the word I’m going to choose here,” said Ketchikan High School principal Rick Dormer.
“Frustrating and a little bit confusing,” said the president of the Anchorage School District board, Andy Holleman.
“It’s our students that are going to lose out,” Northwest Arctic Borough School District Superintendent Terri Walker said.
Walker leads a district based in Kotzebue with 12 schools spread out over a land area about the size of Virginia. Each of those schools, she said in a phone interview, is the center of a community.
“Everything happens in that building, weddings and funerals and meetings, because it’s the … largest place for gathering for the whole community,” she said.
They’re also a haven for often under-resourced communities in times of crisis, she said.
“Oftentimes, many of the villages have catastrophes. Floods, the electricity goes out, their housing freezes up,” she said. “And the school is a safe place to go.”
The veto of House Bill 69 — and the ongoing uncertainty around funding for schools across the state — means her schools’ ability to continue to serve as community hubs is at risk.
Schools in Walker’s district keep their lights on from the early morning late into the evening in recognition of their roles as community gathering places, she said. But costs have skyrocketed. At least 38% of her district’s budget goes to utilities, she said.
“The cost of buying fuel, the electricity bill, water and sewer, it’s gone way up in the last few years,” she said.
Schools have gotten infusions of one-time funding in recent years. But lawmakers and the governor failed to come to terms on a long-term funding boost.
That means Walker is looking at deep cuts to core programs, student activities and even second helpings at meals for hungry students.
“We are really cut to the bare bones right now,” she said. “Chipping at the bones, actually.”
Walker said she’s disappointed that the governor vetoed a bill that would boost basic per-student funding, the base student allocation, by $1,000. She said the $560 increase Dunleavy proposes in a new bill he announced Friday — less general-purpose funding than lawmakers approved in one-time funding last year — won’t stop the bleeding.
“That does not cover half of the deficit that we are looking at,” she said.
In Fairbanks, Superintendent Luke Meinert said that even with status quo funding, equivalent to a $680 increase this year in the base student allocation, his district is bracing for deep cuts. Three elementary schools and 160 staff members are on the chopping block, he said.
“That is on top of devastating cuts that Fairbanks has had to work through in the last several years,” including the closure of seven schools last year, Meinert said.
Jomo Stewart, the president of the Fairbanks Economic Development Corp., said the community’s struggling education system is putting the future of its economy at risk.
“If you have the choice of living in a place (or) staying in a place that has a high quality, well-funded, well-supported educational system, and one that either doesn’t or looks suspect, you will choose the better one,” he said. “So making the proper investments in our educational system, and I mean from pre-K through university, is important.”
According to a report from Stewart’s organization, though the community’s population grew by 0.7% from 2019 to 2023, that’s due largely to an influx of seniors, according to a recent report from his organization.
The number of elders grew 23% over that period. Meanwhile, school enrollment dropped 6% and the number of working-age adults and school-age children dropped by 2%.
‘We don’t actually understand what the strategy is’
In the state’s largest school system, the Anchorage School District, school board President Andy Holleman said leaders are waiting anxiously to see where school funding lands. He said Anchorage, like districts around the state, is also steeling itself for cutbacks.
“We’re starving a little bit, and there’s not much food on the table to begin with,” he said.
The veto was not unexpected. Lawmakers had been working with the governor on a compromise before negotiations appeared to fall apart.
Though lawmakers in the Democrat-dominated caucuses in control of the House and Senate say they’d like to increase funding with a standalone bill, Dunleavy has said again and again that any funding increases should be tied to policy measures that improve the state’s school system.
Senators stripped out policy measures aimed at avoiding a repeat of last year’s education bill veto shortly before the House and Senate approved the bill. The governor called it a “joke” and pledged to veto the bill before the final version even passed. The co-chairs of the Senate Finance Committee, which stripped out the policy provisions earlier this month, voted against the bill’s passage, saying it was too expensive.
Holleman’s not expecting any surprises in an upcoming veto override vote. The bill passed with a one-vote majority in each chamber. It takes two thirds to override. Even supporters say they’re pessimistic about the override’s chances.
Holleman said he’s just fed up with the politics of it all.
“We don’t actually understand what the strategy is,” he said.
He said he’s also not sure whether the governor’s new proposals — which include easing the process of creating and maintaining charter schools, allowing parents to enroll students outside their home district and requiring districts, and placing a new emphasis on growth-based testing — will truly improve student achievement.
There’s also what’s not in the bill. Dunleavy took issue with a provision inserted into a prior version of the bill that would have required correspondence homeschool students to take state assessments to access public funding.
“What they’re calling accountability is confusing to me,” he said.
Holleman stressed that he was speaking on his own behalf, not for the board. But he’s not the only Anchorage School District board member concerned.
Another one, Kelly Lessens, emailed a chart: with the governor’s proposed increase in basic funding, the Anchorage School District is going to need to find more than $31.2 million in cuts.
Ketchikan High School Principal Rick Dormer said he was also dismayed by the back-and-forth that culminated in Thursday’s veto.
“A lot of us were kind of holding our breath,” he said. “And then the governor steps in as one person, … and just says, ‘No, I have a different plan. We’re going to do less funding, and what we’re going to do is a lot of my own personal ideas.’ That’s hard to stomach.”
‘I want them to explain why this is an OK business model’
Dunleavy isn’t just proposing $560 in basic funding. He’s also proposing $35 million in what he calls “targeted” funding — an increase in formula funding for correspondence homeschool, plus an incentive program that would provide a boost for each young student who performs well on literacy assessments. Dunleavy is pitching the total package as equivalent to a $700 base student allocation increase.
But school leaders like Deidre Jenson, the superintendent in Sitka, say that leaves them with a lot of questions.
“Does that mean that we’re going to get it beforehand because we’ve had good scores, because we’ve shown growth? Well, what does it mean for the ones that have been doing all these cuts and they’re not making as good growth?” she said.
“Like, it’s just, what does it mean?”
The one-time funding boosts lawmakers have approved in recent years have not come until the end of the legislative session in late May, weeks or months after school districts have built their budgets.
That leaves districts flying blind, uncertain how much money they’ll receive in the next year, school leaders said. Instead, school boards take guesses on where they think the political football will land.
Some are planning around no increase in long-term funding. Others are budgeting for a $680 boost to the base student allocation, equal to the funding lawmakers approved on a one-time basis last year.
“They want change and incentives to make growth better. You need to give us the money, and then maybe we can do our job,” Jenson said. “Right now, we can’t do the job, because we’re just trying to figure out our budgets and who to cut and where to cut and what not to cut.”
Dormer, the Ketchikan High School principal, said he’s frustrated at the uncertainty over education funding. He recalled his time working in the private sector, including for businesses like Hewlett-Packard and Nike.
“None of them run a business like this. And they make shoes!” he said. “We’re working with people’s children. I have children in Alaska’s schools today. Like, I want them to explain why this is an OK business model and a funding model for people’s children.”
Dormer, echoing other school leaders interviewed for this story, said he wants lawmakers and the governor to work together to figure out a way forward in the 30 or so days left in the legislative session.
“We have leaky roofs and broken boilers. I mean, it’s just degrading,” he said. “I know that’s not what Alaska’s people want.”