Clock ticks down to veto deadline or hard-fought education funding bill in Legislature

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has given legislators until March 14 to pass two education bills or else he will veto Senate Bill 140, the hard-fought school funding bill approved by wide margins in the state House and Senate.

With a short time to go before the deadline there are few signs the Legislature is moving to meet the governor’s demands.

The stakes are big. SB-140 would increase state funding for all schools by $175 million, aid that is badly needed, educators say, since the Base Student Allocation, or BSA, has not been adjusted for inflation since 2017.

The bill would also increase state aid for local pupil transportation, or school bus operations, by $7.5 million. This is important for large school districts like the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, that cover large geographic areas.

One of the governor’s requests for approving SB 140 is for the Legislature to teacher bonuses to aid retention. The other is to widen the authority for the state education board, which is appointed by the governor, to approve charter schools.

The traditional procedure to create a charter school is to originate it locally through elected school boards.

Of the two issues the charter school plan may be the trickiest for the Legislature. Having an avenue for the state board to approve these directly without the application being approved first by a school board undercuts the state’s long tradition of local control. Charter schools are also paid for from school district budgets.

There’s also little evidence there’s really a problem with charter schools, critics of the governor’s proposal say, although the application process is complex. A survey of the five largest school districts which operate most charters shows very few or any waiting lists to form new schools, they say.

“Only one school has been rejected by a school board in the past several years and only one school has had their charter terminated in the last five to 10 years that I know of,” said one educator, asking not to be identified.

In a statement prepared for reporters, the governor’s office defended Dunleavy’s proposal:

“Proposed legislation that would allow charter applicants to apply directly to the State Board of Education does not ‘take away power’ from local school boards or ‘increase power’ of the State Board. The legislation does not change the authority of either the local or state school board, but it does provide charter applicants an additional pathway to apply for a charter school that is more streamlined and efficient,” the statement said.

“Under existing statutes, the State Board can approve a charter application with or without a local school board approving the charter. The process of starting a charter begins with a group at a local level; however, only the State Board of Education can (in the end) authorize a charter school in Alaska,” the statement said.

The governor’s office also rebutted criticism that charter schools tend to favor students from wealthy families.

“It is a false claim that charter schools only benefit students from wealthy families and that charter schools are out of reach for low-income families,” the governor’s office said.

“Charter schools are public schools. A charter school application must include a plan for pupil transportation. Charter schools may (also) participate in child nutrition programs. Claims that ‘some families don’t have the resources to send their child to a charter school’ do not reflect the reality that it takes the same amount of (public) resources to send a child to traditional neighborhood school as it does to send a child to a charter school,” the statement from the governor’s office said.

“The current norm is for charter schools to have a waitlist and for students to be selected by a lottery. The problem is that demand is greater than supply, not that charter schools are out of reach for needy families. The solution is to increase the availability of charter schools,” by streamlining the application process, the governor’s office said.

Critics responded, arguing that since charter schools are paid for from local school district budgets, unless more money is made available by increasing the Base Student Allocation, the formula that guides state funding for all schools, having more charter schools will take money from the traditional public schools.

It also doesn’t ensure the new charter schools will have additional resources. The end result will further degrade the traditional schools’ ability to improve student performance without guaranteeing that student performance will be improved in a new charter school, the critics said.

As for the teacher bonuses, in a bill proposed by Dunleavy last year, no legislator really objects to it but many feel it would hurt morale and create divisions in local schools.

That’s because teachers would get the bonuses while other school professionals would not. Ironically, teachers newly-arrived from the Lower 48 to teach in rural schools, as well as foreign teachers recruited, would benefit from the bonuse but local school workers would not, including many in a community who have worked in their local school for years.

There are still divided opinions on SB 140, however, despite the bill being approved by lopsided margins in the state House and Senate. The House voted 38-2 to approve the bill while the Senate voted 18-1 (one senator was absent).

The one senator voting no was Sen. Mike Shower, R-Mat-Su.

Explaining his position, Shower said the, “Primary reason for voting no is there is no provision for accountability or transparency in the current system to guarantee teachers, the kids and the classroom get any of this BSA increase.

“The legislature repealed the ‘70/30’ provision years ago which required most funding to do so (go to the classroom). Even though we have increased funding by about a third in the last few decades on education, teachers saw an anemic aggregate 4% pay raise - the math doesn't add up,” Shower said in a statement.

“Why would I vote to send more money to the same system without having any way to know they'll spend the money on teachers and kids this time? Is there something wrong with asking for accountability for the money? Or wanting a report from the school districts each year detailing how the money was spent?” he said.