Alaska school districts that are remote and serve mainly students from low-income households need to pay substantially more than they currently do to attract and retain teachers, a study from University of Alaska .

Matthew Berman, a University of Alaska Anchorage economics professor, said that the study shows that compensation does matter when it comes to recruitment and retention — and that some districts can and do pay teachers more to offset other disadvantages like a remote location.

“Relatively advantaged districts are able to fill positions and retain qualified teachers fairly easily without offering high salaries, but then there are relatively disadvantaged communities that have a handicap and they can overcome some of that by compensating teachers more,” he said. “But the handicaps for some communities may be so large, it’s really unrealistic to expect that compensation alone could make up the difference.”

The study uses data from a contract the university had with the state’s education department during the administration of former Gov. Bill Walker. Berman said the researchers are currently taking a look at more recent data and finding similar, but magnified results after the pandemic.

The results of the study showed that compensation rates were adequate to hire and keep teachers in the state’s urban and suburban school districts. But to have equity in many rural communities, districts would need to pay substantially more.

Berman said he was surprised by the degree to which some schools may have to compensate teachers to make up for other challenges. He said if an average teacher salary is around $55,000-$60,000 a year, it could take a salary of up to $120,000 to recruit and retain teachers in a rural district.

“That’s just beyond the capacity of all rural districts, really, except possibly the North Slope Borough,” he said. He noted that they do pay teachers more there, though not in the $120,000 a year range, as far as he knew.

Study results said that one in five of the state’s schools would need to pay teachers 25%-50% more to hire and keep them, especially in the western and northern parts of the state.

Districts that cannot pay such high salaries need to look at other solutions that the study showed may lead to teacher retention, like improved working conditions.

“Achieving equity of teacher qualifications would likely require that policymakers and district leaders also implement non-compensation strategies for improving working conditions in high-need schools,” the study said.

He said a barrier to increasing teacher wages in rural districts is that basic operating costs can be significantly higher than in other areas. He said the foundation funding formula, the method the state uses to try to equitably fund school districts with different costs and challenges, doesn’t do enough for certain schools.

So even if the state’s school funding formula gives a rural school more money, it may not be enough to cover the higher operations costs and offer salaries that would be competitive for the region.

“Remote, rural districts are not able to pay their teachers enough. And the foundation does not provide enough resources for them to be able to do that,” he said, citing higher costs for fuel, food and maintenance. “They have to be able to use the money to compensate teachers.”

Berman said there are limits to what compensation can accomplish, too. For example, he said a signing bonus can help recruit a teacher, but doesn’t do much to retain them.

The study also showed some outlier schools that Berman said will be the subject of future publications. They are places that show high recruitment and retention of teachers even though they may not offer the highest salaries. He and his colleagues will be looking at what goes into success there in the coming months.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

Parents of Alaska public school students would be required to OK every lesson taught by their child’s teacher under approved Wednesday by the House Education Committee.

Without permission, the student would be held out of field trips, extracurricular activities, and even basic lessons on algebra, biology and history.

The revised bill also requires school districts to make single-person restrooms available to students.

A prior version, , would have prohibited transgender students from using their preferred bathroom if it didn’t match their “biological sex.” That idea was removed by the committee after hours of public testimony that saw a majority of speakers opposing the idea.

Under the new version, no one would be required to use a particular restroom.

An additional provision in the rewritten bill requires parents to give school districts “a list of all the names and pronouns” that can be used to refer to a student.

This would prevent a transgender student from using a different name without their parent’s knowledge and permission.

The bill is not yet final; it awaits further committee hearings and has yet to pass either the House or Senate.

The new language advanced on a 4-3 vote after committee members amended , which originally stated that parents would have to opt into sex-education classes. The governor’s office labeled the measure a “parental rights” bill, and its details resembled those debated in majority-Republican states across the country.

Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, revised the bill after consulting with the governor’s office, he said. The revisions followed hours of public testimony, mostly against the original bill.

“I think it was pretty clear from the testimony — especially the testimony that we received in written form — that parents really do want to know, and feel connected to, what their kids are learning at school,” he said.

Given that the governor’s original idea was for “parents rights” legislation, he said, “if we’re going to hear a bill and do work on a bill about parents rights, we should really talk about it in its entirety.”

He envisions parents being presented with a syllabus and being asked to approve it.

“Here’s the plan for the next three or four months, here’s the books we’re going to read and the categories we’re going to discuss. Please let me know if this sounds good to you,” he said, describing a hypothetical process. “And then if there’s any changes to that … a permission slip goes out.”

“It’s just not practical,” said Lon Garrison, director of the , which represents local school districts in the Capitol.

He said it would create a huge administrative burden for school administrators and raises questions about what will happen to students whose parents opt them out of lessons.

Then, there’s the practical considerations — requiring parental approval for any changes would prevent teachers from incorporating new material during the school year.

“Right now, the curriculum is approved by the school board; it’s available for everybody to review. But there’s also additional materials that teachers can bring in as long as it’s aligned with the curriculum. And so every time that would happen, theoretically, if you read this bill, you’d have to get permission to do that,” he said.

On the seven-member education committee, four Republicans — Reps. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River; Mike Prax, R-North Pole; Tom McKay, R-Anchorage; and Ruffridge — voted for the changed bill.

Three non-Republicans — Reps. Andi Story, D-Juneau; Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka; and Rep. CJ McCormick, D-Bethel — voted against it.

Allard, co-chair of the education committee, called the bill “much-needed” and said she expects more changes to come when it reaches the judiciary committee.

“Now that it’s moving to Judiciary, it will give us more time to work,” she said.

Prax said he thinks it was a mistake for states to mandate school attendance, a practice that began with Massachusetts in 1853.

“That was the original mistake,” he said in committee, adding afterward that a bill like Wednesday’s proposal helps restore teaching authority to parents, rather than government officials.

“We should have asked ourselves: What crime did parents commit by allowing their children to turn 7, that they have to be sent to school?” Prax said.

McCormick, the youngest member of the Legislature, grew passionate as he spoke against the bill. He graduated from high school in 2015 and said he ran for office to make life easier for kids like him. Wednesday’s bill does the opposite, he said.

“I feel like this bill strips our state’s young people of the ability to make choices for themselves,” he said. “It denies them the ability to live with dignity.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

New data shows that Alaska’s children are struggling in key areas such as education and health, according to an analysis of data recently presented to state lawmakers. Alaska ranked 41st among the states for overall child well-being, in gathered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in partnership with state nonprofits, including the Alaska Children’s Trust.

Education and health were two of the categories where Alaska’s children struggled in the Kids Count report, which also gathered data about children’s family and community, as well as economic well-being. According to the report — which was presented to the Senate Education Committee on Monday — Alaska ranks second to last when it comes to education. Trevor Storrs, who is the president and CEO of the Alaska Children’s Trust, said this is a reason to support education more. He said that when some see this number, their first instinct may be to tighten education spending more on the presumption that it is not effective. He said this was the wrong approach.

“When you’re choking somebody, it’s not a surprise that they don’t get a full breath,” he said in his presentation.

The subject of education has been a hot-button issue in Alaska recently, with many calling for an increase in the to raise the amount of money for each student in public schools.

Senate President and member of the Senate Education Committee Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, has said that education funding is a priority for his caucus. Beyond funding, Stevens in an interview shared his concerns about in the Alaska education system in an interview. “We just have to educate kids, and the worst thing we can do is to withdraw issues that are important to them like health and sexual education. I think it’s a danger when you start removing that from the curriculum,” he said.

Worries about student reading and math proficiency were also brought to light in the report. The percentage of 8th-grade students not proficient in math and 4th-grade students not proficient in reading rose between 2009 and 2019.

And the lack of school preparation was not only found in Alaska middle and elementary school students. The report also found that on average, only about one third of children who entered kindergarten between 2021 and 2022 were considered to be ready for school.

“[T]he whole idea of us looking at the state of children is there’s a multitude of things going on, and we need to be having a greater conversation of what are the successes, what do we want for our kids?” said Storrs regarding the data. “How do we get them on the right path, how do we keep them safe, nurtured, and secure while still supporting parents being parents but as a community uplifting that?”

While some legislators support increasing broad-based education funding, others are skeptical. Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, said that broad increases were not the way to approach the fraught issue of education in Alaska.

“A general funding increase is not the answer,” she said. “We have to make sure the schools are using the dollars. In fact, I think they ought to be using the dollars they already received in a more performance-based kind of way.”

Hughes said she supports directing money toward teachers in the form of increased salaries and employer-sponsored retirement plans.

“I would like to see teachers be incentivized,” said Hughes. “I think we should give teachers more autonomy to figure out what might be best for a child.”

More support for teachers might alleviate problems like low percentages of reading proficiency in middle and high school students, according to Hughes. “We have to be precise and play accordingly if we really care about the kids,” she remarked.

While education in Alaska is subject of concern, Storrs also urged legislators to consider poor child welfare as it relates to health.

Among a wide range of information pertaining to child health, teen suicide stood out. In 2019, 22% of Alaska high school students planned a suicide attempt within the previous 12 months.

Storrs said that this number represents a culmination of stressors such as isolation and increased social media use that may have been exacerbated by the pandemic. He described these stressors and others contributing to lower child well-being in Alaska as an elastic band: It can only be stretched so far before it snaps.

“That elastic is snapping in so many ways for these kids so that they’re at these dark, dark points. We really need to be having a stronger conversation around not just teen suicides, but that really preventative upstream [measures] and how it’s all connected,” he said in the presentation.

In terms of what that upstream prevention should look like, Storrs says that increasing child well-being should start with economic well-being.

“Economic well-being we know plays a major part in many of the social determinants that are negatively impacting families,” Storrs said in an interview.

Part of that economic well-being would involve providing Alaskans with adequate housing, food security, a livable wage and parental leave, among other measures.

Storrs believes that economic well-being can have a trickle-down effect. When families don’t have to worry about money as much, he said, they can focus on providing for their families and children. “The more that we can bring economic positivity and success to families, it gives them greater access,” he said.

While the statistics may appear negative, Storrs cautions against taking that viewpoint. “Even though we’re doing worse, [it] doesn’t mean overall we’re doing bad,” he said. He emphasized that it’s important to keep a wide view of the issues facing Alaska’s children, especially when compared to the rest of the nation.

And, there were areas where Alaska had positive improvements in child welfare. Notably, the percentage of teen births in Alaska decreased significantly since 2010, which is on trend with the rest of the nation. The report also showed that more children are participating in after-school activities than in previous years.

Storrs encouraged legislators to keep these more positive trends in mind when looking at the picture of child welfare so as not to get caught up in a single negative statistic. However, he narrowed in on the greater problems that he believed Alaska should not ignore.

“Our systems are being starved to the point where they can’t provide the knowledge, skills, supports and resources that children and families in communities need to be able to thrive,” he said. “Our children and our families are hurting.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

Alaskans will no longer need college degrees for most state jobs, under an issued Tuesday by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

The action is needed because of the labor shortage that affects Alaska and the nation, Dunleavy said in a statement.

“Today people can gain knowledge, skills and abilities through on-the-job experience. If we’re going to address our labor shortage, we have to recognize the value that apprenticeships, on-the-job training, military training, trade schools and other experience provides applicants. If a person can do the job, we shouldn’t be holding anyone back just because they don’t have a degree,” the Republican governor said in the statement.

The administrative order instructs the state’s personnel managers to review job classifications and positions and identify those for which practical experience or alternate training is an appropriate substitute for college degrees. Future job postings will list relevant experience that can substitute for college degrees when reasonable, according to the order.

Labor shortages “are impacting the delivery of essential state services,” the order said. “At present, there are not enough qualified applicants to fill all the state’s job vacancies. This unprecedented demand for labor throughout the State of Alaska requires the government to be flexible in recruiting, hiring, and retaining a talented and able workforce capable of serving the people of Alaska.”

With Dunleavy’s order, Alaska joins a list of states that have formally removed college degrees as requirements for most state jobs. Others include , and .

State lawmakers, meanwhile, are contemplating steps to address the state’s labor shortage.

The state Senate Labor and Commerce Committee has been holding a series of hearings about workforce challenges in both the public and private sectors. So far, the committee has heard from state commissioners and agency directors, municipal government officials, business representaves, educators, health care providers and others.

The workforce challenge has been a “resounding theme over and over,” Julie Sande, commissioner of the Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development, told the committee on Jan. 20, during the first of those hearings.

Meeting the challenge will require a wide variety of policies and responses, Sande said.

“We recognize if we don’t have a healthy workforce, if we don’t have housing, if we don’t have child care, we aren’t going to be able to effectively move the economy forward for the state of Alaska,” she told the committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

Nearly 18 years ago, about 6,000 young Alaskans left high school and launched into adulthood. Where did they end up?

Slightly half were still in Alaska as of 2021, but the percentage was much smaller for those who got college degrees outside of the state, according to an analysis by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Results are in the February issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the monthly magazine of the department’s research and analysis division.

There is “nothing magical” about the class of 2005, said Dan Robinson, the department’s chief of research and analysis and a coauthor of the report. However, it is the oldest group for which researchers were able to amass the most information, he said.

The report follows up on earlier reports and in Alaska Economic Trends that analyzed the class of 2005’s situations and movements five years after leaving high school. Together, the studies are part of a collaborative project of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development and the University of Alaska.

About three-quarters of those Alaskans who graduated from high school in 2005 chose to attend college at some point, and about a third wound up holding bachelor’s or associate degrees by 2021, the newly published report said.

Of those class of 2005 members who earned two- or four-year college degrees within Alaska, 55% were still in the state in 2021, according to the findings. But those who got their degrees outside of Alaska, only 25% were living in the state by 2021, according to the findings.

Whether that is a sign of an Alaska “brain drain” is open to interpretation. During the period, Robinson noted, there were plenty of degree-holders from elsewhere who moved into Alaska, part of a long-term demographic pattern of ebb and flow.

“It’s always been a brain exchange. We get and we give,” he said.

Of those 2005 high school graduates who attended college, most did so in Alaska, the analysis found. Among those who left Alaska for college, the most popular states were Washington, Oregon, Arizona and California.

The college experiences of the 2005 high school graduates, who are now in their 30s, generally predate Alaska’s . Robinson said it is likely that the percentage of Alaska college students attending school outside of the state has grown in recent years.

The report also analyzed professional and income outcomes for the group. By 2021, health care was the top professional category for degree-holders from the 2005 high school year – possibly an indicator of health care’s importance in the overall economy. For those without degrees, the top professional category was construction trades, according to the findings.

Class of 2005 members who obtained college degrees of some type significantly out-earned their colleagues without degrees – but that outcome took time, the results showed. For the first few years after high school, those Alaskans who skipped college or attended without obtaining degrees out-earned the degree-holders. The turning point in the trend was 2011; by 2021, the average earned by degree-holding members of the class of 2005 was $70,642 a year, compared to $52,270 for those with some college but no degree and $49,284 for those without any college, according to the findings.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

As the Alaska Legislature’s 2023 session approaches, a state Senate leader on Thursday highlighted the potential benefits of that body’s newly formed .

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel said the nine Democrats and eight Republican in the coalition have shared values.

“This coalition formed with a goal, and that is working together to keep Alaska a producing state – not a consuming state, but a producing state,” the Anchorage Republican told the Resource Development Council for Alaska at a .

The across-the-aisle collaboration contrasts with hostility that has stymied progress within Alaska and elsewhere, said Giessel, who mentioned the ongoing stalemate in the U.S. House, in which no speaker had been selected as of Thursday. “We see a lot of political division right now, not just in Alaska but nationally, right?”

The 17-member Senate majority that was announced on Nov. 25 makes official what had been an informal working coalition in recent legislative sessions that enabled practical legislation and budget decisions, Giessel said. “This coalition that you see, 17 members, bipartisan, is actually an acknowledgement of what’s been going on for the last four years in the Alaska Senate,” she said.

It also reflects the will of the Alaska public. “The prevailing message that I hear from other folks in our coalition that they heard from Alaskans was, ‘We’re tired of the fighting. We want you to get along and get something done,’” she said.

One is education, which “is going to be a key issue,” she said.

School districts are stressed with funding and inflation problems that must be addressed through the budget, she said. But there are deep problems beyond that, she said. The experience with COVID-19 isolated children and caused educational setbacks, even for straight-A students, she said.

“The pandemic was devastating for our kids,” she said.

The health and economic impacts took tolls on students’ mental and behavioral health, too, she said.

“Our kids are living with worries, anxiety, bringing depression that you and I never had to deal with,” she said.

Another priority will likely be recruitment and retention of qualified teachers, Giessel said. She noted that Alaska teachers are not entitled to Social Security retirement benefits, which the Senate coalition might address. “It’s quite likely that we’re going to be looking at some kind of a pension retirement-type program,” she said.

More broadly, workforce development is a priority for the coalition, both in the private and public sectors, Giessel said.

In the public sector, there are possibly three departments in state government “that are on the verge of being nonfunctional because so many state employees have left service to the state.” That means “profound” delays in services like permitting and licensing, she said.

In both the private and public sectors, there is a need to ensure that workers have access to childcare, she said. “How do you solve that problem? This is a very low-compensated job that is critically important to businesses, to your employees.” she said.

On energy, priorities are likely to concern lowering costs to Alaskans – seen as necessary to helping to diversify the economy – and addressing potential Southcentral natural gas shortages. Coalition members are also interested in developing renewable and alternative energy, including potential for hydrogen and more hydroelectric power.

Food security is a broad issue of concern to the coalition, Giessel said. There might be some action to enhance the state’s agricultural opportunities, she said. And coalition members hope to respond to dire problems in fisheries and the , problems that are connected in part to climate change. That points to budgeting issues, she said. “Fish and Game, as a department, needs to have the funding it needs to do the science it needs to help it manage our resources,” she said.

Those and other priorities depend on budgeting, which will be extra challenging in the coming session, Giessel and Sen. Click Bishop, the incoming majority whip, told the RDC audience.

Coalition members will get more detail on budget problems at their pre-session retreat, which was to start later Thursday, said Bishop, a Fairbanks Republican.

The problems are dire, he said. “I do know that we’re upside-down on our revenue by over $1 billion from the spring to the fall forecast,” he said.

Falling oil prices have dampened expectations for to the state. And the outlook is diminished for investment earnings from the , which has become the top source of revenue for the state. Investment losses have taken a big toll on the fund, which has declined by about $6.5 billion in value since mid-2021.

Neither Giessel nor Bishop presented themselves as fans of big Alaska Permanent Fund dividends.

Giessel said the huge dividends that some Alaskans are demanding are unaffordable. “We’ve got to bring that dividend subject under control,” she said. “We need to protect the fund itself.”

Bishop said much of the $17 billion that has gone “out the door” in dividends since 2002 could have been better used, as infrastructure investment that would have helped build the state’s economy, for example. During the past decade, he noted, the state’s gross domestic product has declined and Alaska has had net .

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

This week, the Anchorage School District announced that it is amid a projected $68 million budget shortfall.

Anchorage isn’t the only district facing a major fiscal problem. At the end of the last school year, Fairbanks closed three schools. In Juneau, the school board is considering whether to fire specialists intended to help students recover reading skills lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. In rural Alaska, districts are trying to balance their books while dealing with high transportation and heating costs.

Local and statewide officials say these decisions are rooted in the same Alaska-wide problem: Most school funding is delivered by the state, and the state’s per-student funding formula has failed to keep pace with inflation.

“Everything costs more. It costs a tremendous amount to heat our buildings, provide electricity, provide transportation. Everything has gone up. Liability insurance, health care insurance have been huge drivers, and we haven’t kept up with it,” Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Superintendent Clayton Holland said.

“We are definitely having the same budget problems that others are around the state, trying to do just the same amount with deflated dollars,” said Brian Holst, a member of the Juneau school board.

Federal relief funding forestalled the need for major action during the COVID-19 pandemic, but most districts have exhausted that aid or will by next year. Meanwhile, school enrollment is less than what it was before the pandemic, exacerbating a problem created by a funding formula that pays districts per student.

“I think a lot of school districts in the state found the (federal relief) money to be basically the only thing that’s stopping the absolute bleeding of our school districts,” said Wrangell Public Schools Superintendent Bill Burr. “We’re facing a squeeze point.”

School districts have incrementally cut staff and services to keep pace with inflation, but in many cases, those cuts have reached a limit, and the issue is coming to a head as districts prepare their budgets for the next fiscal year.

“Districts are planning their budgets for fiscal year ’24, and they’re just projecting huge deficits, and school board members have to make decisions based on the future projection,” said Rep. Andi Story, D-Juneau.

“School board members have to have a balanced budget, and they have to start working on it now,” said Story, who served on the Juneau school board before joining the Legislature.

Persistent problems with funding

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the state was , once Alaska’s cost of living is included in the calculation. (In unadjusted dollars, the state spent the sixth-most per student in 2019.)

“I hear a lot of people say Alaska spends more per pupil than any other state, and if you just look at straight dollars, it’s not true,” said Dayna Defeo, director of the Center for Alaska Education Policy Research.

“When you adjust for (cost of living), our per pupil spending is less than the national average, and we’ve been kind of falling,” she said.

This year, state legislators and Gov. Mike Dunleavy approved a sweeping known as the Alaska Reads Act. That bill includes a small increase – half of 1% – in the amount the state pays districts per student, a figure known as the base student allocation, or BSA.

Until that adjustment, the state hadn’t changed the BSA in six years, allowing inflation to eat away at its value.

“Flat funding really is education cuts, year after year after year after year,” said Jim Anderson, chief financial officer of the Anchorage School District.

Story proposed legislation this year to increase the BSA and a separate bill to tie it to inflation. Neither bill passed the Legislature.

“Having good schools for our children is just so important to families. It’s so important to the business world. I just can’t say that enough. It’s so important to our economy,” Story said.

She said she wanted to increase the BSA by 8%, the amount of inflation between 2017 and spring 2022, but she halved that figure to 4% in order to get more support. It didn’t help.

In the Legislature, conservative Republicans said they first wanted to see improved performance from public schools before increasing spending. Alaska schools perform at or near the bottom of the nation in standardized math and reading tests.

That meant there was support for the Alaska Reads Act, which imposes new reading standards, but not for Story’s funding increase.

“Yes, that was important,” Story said of the reading bill, “but we also need to take care of these base costs for districts.”

The student-funding increase in the reading bill worked out to $30 per student.

“I was so discouraged about that,” Story said.

Enrollment woes exacerbate the problem

Alaska’s public-school enrollment peaked in the 2016-2017 school year, with 130,295 students enrolled, according to .

Since then, enrollment has declined, bottoming out in the pandemic-affected 2020-2021 school year at just over 127,000 students. Enrollment rose slightly last school year, and figures for the current year are not yet available, but administrators say the preliminary figures are mixed.

Some districts have had more severe drops than others. In Anchorage, enrollment is down by almost 10%, from almost 48,000 students in 2016 to less than 43,000 last school year.

Wrangell, a small island community in Southeast Alaska, faced the largest percentage drop in the state between anticipated and actual enrollment in fall 2020. Instead of 308 students, the district’s three schools had only 178. It’s since risen – to 257 last fall and about 263 this fall. But that’s close to 50 students that are no longer in the system.

“A 50-student drop is pretty significant, even if it’s spaced out over over three years, because they just aren’t here,” Wrangell Superintendent Burr said.

Some of the changes appear driven by demographic trends: Alaska’s population is aging, more people are moving out than moving in, and adults are having fewer children per couple.

Enrollment at correspondence schools and in homeschool programs , ruling that out as a possible reason for the decline.

Laurel Shoop, a special assistant at the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, said the state hasn’t analyzed the causes of the enrollment decline and isn’t aware of any third-party research on the issue.

The decline exacerbates school districts’ problem: Not only have per-student payments failed to keep pace with inflation, districts are getting fewer of those per-student payments because there are fewer students.

“You certainly are getting less money because you have less students, but the buying power of that less money is even smaller per student,” Anderson said of declining enrollment and lack of inflation proofing. “It’s just complicated by both of them at the same time running together and colliding.”

District effects across the state

School districts received millions in federal relief funding during the pandemic, which offset the fiscal cliff many districts are facing or will soon face. Anderson said COVID funding insulated the problem and budget holes got hidden with one-time funding.

“It makes it invisible, especially the last two and a half years with the federal funding that we used in lieu of an inflation-improve fix at state level; it really just hid that gap,” he said.

Anderson said the state has prioritized other requirements over education.
“If we had not had the federal dollars, what we’re going through this year, we would have gone through two or three years ago,” Anderson said.

Aside from using one-time state or federal funding, the district has taken other measures to manage the budget gaps, like merging programs and reducing staff. The district closed two schools in recent years – Mount Iliamna Elementary School in 2016 and Mount Spurr Elementary in 2018.

Potentially closing six additional elementary schools at the end of this school year could save the district . The district still needs to find savings elsewhere. The school board has options to choose from, including dipping into savings and making more cuts. Staff make up 88% of the district’s budget, Anderson said.

If the state “would have inflation-proofed the BSA, the district would not be in this situation,” he said.

Karen Melin is chief school administrator for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, which closed three schools at the end of last school year, partly due to a tightening budget.

Melin said the district examined how they were using facilities, some decades old and not at capacity.

“We took a pretty comprehensive look at it and said, ‘Okay, this isn’t an efficient use of square footage in dollars.’ So we made that shift. And I think we’ll see more of that happening across the state,” Melin said.

Melin said pandemic relief funding bought them time but it’s not a way to fund a budget. The state had cautioned districts against using the money for operating funds, she said.
“But in reality, it was the money we had and so it was the money we had to use. So, it just kicked the can down the road. And now that the CARES funding is coming to an end, we’ve kicked the can all the way down the road to where, now, we’re out of road.”

Melin said the district has already trimmed “to lean,” made efficiencies in many areas and will look to identify more.

“There’s just no way to balance a $14 million deficit in a budget that has 86% personnel without it dipping into personnel. So how that’s going to look, I don’t know yet,” she said. “We can have a lot of really expensive staff, or more less-expensive staff, and that’s kind of the balance that we have to look at.”

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District will likely be considering cuts when its federal funding runs out next year.

“We’re going to be facing this fiscal cliff. For us, that means that we’re really looking at the possibility of laying off or not filling 65 to 70 positions with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, teaching positions,” district superintendent Holland said.

Terri Walker is superintendent of the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, which has schools in 11 communities not connected by roads spread out over 39,000 square miles. The district serves about 1,900 students.

Walker said the district has made many cuts over the past several years – to positions in the district office, to programs like Career-Technical Education, and to pre-kindergarten.

“And we cut counselors so then sites had to share counselors. Some of our villages are close to each other, close meaning between 10 to 70 miles apart. The local airline here flies to a couple of the villages and then returns, and so we just had them share counselors so the counselor would spend time at one site and then spend some time at the other site,” Walker said.

Many of the cuts have been restored due to one-time federal funding or funding from NANA Regional Corporation and the borough. Funding for pre-K, CTE teachers and counselors are not coming from the district’s general fund, Walker said.

“We do need the state to step up,” she said.

The district is also dealing with rising freight costs. All the schools in the district qualify for free meals from the federal government, so the district gets fully reimbursed for the cost of the food. But it costs an additional $1.2 million to ship the food, Walker said. Right now, those freight costs are being paid with federal school emergency relief. When that funding stops, she said the district will have to pay those shipping costs.

“We’re gonna have to figure out something because we cannot not feed kids,” Walker said. “So we’re gonna have to put that money back into our general fund.”

Issue reaches the governor’s race

The school funding issue has become a major issue in this year’s governor elections. In a televised debate Wednesday night, Democratic candidate Les Gara called the situation “the worst crisis in public education in state history.”

“Education in Alaska, as far as I’m concerned, is swirling the drain,” said independent candidate Bill Walker. “That’s how bad it’s gotten.”

He said a reliable state fiscal plan would help the state “fully fund” education.

Gara has advocated automatic inflation adjustments for the base-student formula and said he is the only candidate to do so.

He and Walker criticized incumbent Dunleavy, a Republican, for not acting on the problem.

In the debate, Dunleavy responded by saying that this year’s state budget contains funding for education a year ahead of time. That money is dependent upon the price of oil staying high.

He also said that districts have benefited from federal relief money and the reading bill.

“I’d be more than happy to sit down with a number of the school districts and have a discussion as to why they are short on their budgets,” Dunleavy said. “Do they have a school district that was geared for thousands of more students? There’s a number of things we can take a look at — plenty — and money is certainly something that they’ve gotten this year.”

Republican candidate Charlie Pierce, who also participated in the debate, said he doesn’t support raising the base-student formula.

“I think it’s really more of a school board issue,” he said.

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