Assemblyman: Follow per-student money

PALMER — In theory, at least, an ordinance about to go before the Mat-Su Borough Assembly should just be a change to school district budget reporting processes.

But the school board president said she sees something more at play.

The ordinance, according to the assembly member who proposed it, Jim Colver, is simply a way to show the assembly in clearer terms where school money is going. Part of that would break the budget down into dollars and cents provided to each borough school. Colver said it’s another tool for the assembly to use at budget time.

But school board president Colleen Vague wondered what comes next.

“If this was the end of the road I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But it’s not,” Vague said at the school board’s meeting Wednesday.

Her fear, she said, is that, “this is a way to get to the next step, which is to see how much money we are spending per student in each school so we can change the way that we do funding.”

The district gets a per-student allotment from the state of a certain amount of money each year. The district then decides on its own how to best divide up that money. Some schools get more per student than others. But her fear, she said, is that the ordinance would be followed up with one directing that money coming from the state follow each student to his or her school.

A day before at the borough assembly’s meeting, Vague told the assembly what that would mean. Elementary schools like Sutton, Talkeetna, Trapper Creek, Beryozova and Glacier View would shut down. The brand new Su Valley Jr./Sr. High School might also be closed.

Those schools, she said, have low enrollments. And if the money follows the student, they won’t have enough money to stay open.

“We simply don’t have the money to keep those schools running efficiently,” she said.

Colver, for his part, said that’s not the intent of his ordinance.

“The ordinance doesn’t direct spending for the schools,” he said. “No schools will be closed.”

At the school board meeting, Vague said the money has to be allocated the way it is. Intensive needs and small-school students soak up more money than their less-needy classmates. But the board, she said, strives to make the distribution fair, even if it’s not, in dollars and cents, equal per se.

“It needs to be spread in such a way that education is equitable, not necessarily equal in dollar value,” she said.

But, as for the ordinance on the table, the school board as a whole wasn’t necessarily opposed. But they did worry about something the schools superintendent brought up.

Superintendent George Troxel said that to ferret out the information Colver is asking for and to restate the budget in the format required would cost the district $250,000 in extra personnel costs. A lot of the district’s budget breaks down into programs, rather than schools. Maintenance is a good example. Every school has janitors, but the schools don’t have their own janitorial budgets. And, he said, if transparency is the goal, restating the budget that way might actually muddy the waters.

“When budget reporting is isolated by location, a skewed view of what is occurring across the district is given. Education services, not dollars, are allocated to students. Equity of services can’t be reconciled in dollars alone,” Troxel wrote in a memo he prepared before the meeting.

Board member Ole Larson said he thinks the school board should work with the assembly since, after all, it’s the assembly that holds the district’s purse strings.

“Somehow I think that we’re going to have to as a school board, meet with them, figure out what they want, and give them the information,” he said. “We cannot ask the borough for more money if we’re in an adversarial relationship.”

Board member Erick Cordero said he wondered if giving them the information might, in the long run, be more beneficial to the district.

“Yes, it’s going to cost more, but at the end perhaps by providing them that information it could benefit us more in the form of additional funding if they see the need out there,” Cordero said.

Mike Dunleavy, who, prior to becoming a school board member, served as superintendent of the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, said he was surprised to find so much friction between the borough and its school board when he was elected. It’s not something he encountered in his previous position.

“The adults, all of us, are not relating well to each other and it’s getting in the way of these type of discussions and what’s best for kids,” he said. “Whether we’re with the borough or the school district we’re serving the same constituents.”