As Ketchikan’s school district issues some 50-plus layoff notices to teachers and administrators, even as it hopes to recall most of them, there’s a lot of finger-pointing going around. Some members of Ketchikan’s school board and Borough Assembly are pointing to the state Legislature, saying lawmakers’ failure to boost school funding leaves them millions of dollars short of what they need.
Lawmakers wrapped up their four-month legislative session on Wednesday. KRBD’s Michael Fanelli spoke with Alaska Public Media’s state government reporter (and former KRBD News Director), Eric Stone, for a recap of the education funding debate at the Capitol this year.
Michael Fanelli: So bring us up to speed — I know education funding was a big topic in Juneau this year.
Eric Stone: That’s right, Michael. Right from the get-go, in mid-January, folks on every side of the aisle were talking about a long-term increase in education funding. That includes the Republican-led majority caucus in the House, and the House minority coalition, which includes independent Ketchikan Rep. Dan Ortiz.
And the 17-member bipartisan Senate majority — and by the way, that’s 85% of the Senate, including Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island’s senator, Sitka Republican Bert Stedman — said boosting education funding was their number one priority.
And early on, there was a lot of hope. In the early weeks of the session, the House Republicans pitched a $300 increase in the base student allocation, or BSA.
Now — one important thing to know about that is that $300 would have actually been a cut in education funding, since schools got more than that in one-time funding last year. So that $300 figure ran into a lot of resistance from Democrats, independents and even some moderate Republicans in the House.
So after some negotiations, they settled on a compromise. There’d be a $680-per-student increase in basic state funding — that’s how much the Legislature approved last year in one-time funding before the governor vetoed half of it. The compromise also included some more funding for pupil transportation, correspondence schools, plus some provisions that lawmakers say would make it easier to start a charter school. Just about everybody in the Legislature wound up voting for it, including Ortiz and Stedman, and it passed in a combined vote of 56-3. That was Senate Bill 140, if folks remember.
MF: But then Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it.
ES: That’s right. He said the overall package didn’t do two things he wanted: He wanted the state school board to be able to approve new charter schools. And he wanted lawmakers to approve teacher bonuses of up to $15,000. Those were his two big priorities.
But they were non-starters in the Senate — the Senate president, Kodiak Republican Gary Stevens, actually used to be a school board member, and he said he was worried that letting the state school board approve charter schools could leave local districts to fund charter schools that they didn’t approve of. And the bonus proposal would cost something like $60 million a year, and senators weren’t convinced the state would get its money’s worth out of them.
And here’s where it gets interesting: even though the $680 BSA boost passed 56-3 to start, when it came time to vote on overriding the veto, which takes a two-thirds combined vote of the House and Senate, some folks didn’t want to go against the governor, and the override wound up failing by one vote — it got 39 votes and needed 40.
MF: And how did Ketchikan’s delegation, Dan Ortiz and Bert Stedman, vote?
ES: They voted for the long-term boost in education funding both times. The folks who switched were Republicans from the Mat-Su and parts of Anchorage, plus one from Tok and another from Kotzebue.
So — once that override failed, hopes for a long-term increase in education funding really started to fade. There were some efforts to find a new compromise, but again, the Senate and the governor were really at an impasse, and nothing wound up going the distance.
MF: And that’s how we got where we are now.
ES: That is right. Once that BSA package failed to make it past the governor, lawmakers writing the state budget put $175 million in one-time funding in the operating budget. That’s roughly equal to $680 per student. And that was approved in a final vote on Wednesday when the Legislature approved the budget. Stedman voted for the budget, and Ortiz voted against it. That’s fairly typical if you’re in the minority.
But as it happens, Wednesday was also the deadline for Ketchikan to issue those layoff notices. And until Gov. Dunleavy unveils all of his various line-item vetoes of various budget items, we won’t know for sure how much money schools will get. Although in early May he said pretty clearly he agreed with the “six-eighty-something” in one-time funding. But we don’t know for sure. And that makes it really hard for school districts to plan. There are a bunch of budget deadlines that roll past long before the state operating budget gets finalized.
And what we’re seeing in Ketchikan, with folks getting layoff notices, and then probably getting recalled back to their jobs, that’s really what folks were hoping to avoid. That’s why lawmakers tried to pass a BSA increase early in the session, back in the winter — to give districts certainty. Because if you’re a teacher, and you get a pink slip, and you’re not sure if you have a job next fall, you might start looking for another one. And that’s a good way to lose quality teachers. That’s the argument folks made for doing it early. But it just didn’t work out that way.
MF: Alright — that was Alaska Public Media’s Eric Stone running us through this year’s legislative saga on school funding. Thanks for taking time for the people of Ketchikan.
ES: I’ve always got time for Ketchikan. Tell everybody in town I miss them.
