Gattis sponsors education legislation

MAT-SU — One of the Valley’s newest state legislators, Lynn Gattis, isn’t wasting any time taking on education issues.

Lynn Gattis, R-Wasilla, is head of the state House Education Committee. She sponsored three bills related to how schools are formed and funded on the legislature’s agenda.

Most recently, a bill announced Wednesday, is written in celebration of something called National School Choice Week and would encourage the creation of more charter schools, according to a legislative press release.

Currently, the state requires charter schools apply to a local school district in order to form.

Gattis’ bill would allow for more than just that single authorizer and let a local college, a government entity like a borough or a municipality, or a nonprofit “that has expertise in education, finance or administration, or any combination of those areas” authorize a charter school. An organization would have to apply to the state Department of Education to become an authorizer.

Gattis’ office says that churches wouldn’t qualify as authorizers — an application from a church would likely fail at the state level — but something like a Native corporation probably would.

The intent, Gattis says, is to increase the number of charter schools in the state and therefore the choice parents have in education. Once established and approved by the state — as charter schools already are — these new charter schools would be entitled to public funding in the form of the state per-pupil allowance and the concomitant local funding.

“The school district in which the charter school is located shall timely disburse the entire amount generated by students enrolled in the charter school directly to the charter school,” according to the bill.

Another bill, this one co-sponsored by Gattis with Eric Feige, R-Chickaloon, as the primary sponsor, changes the way boroughs and municipalities fund school districts and the way the state counts students for its per-pupil allowance.

Boroughs and municipalities wouldn’t be allowed to take back money it allocated to schools unless the district has a legislatively defined amount in its accounts at the end of the year.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly has in the past debated with its school board on this point. The rules here say the borough gets to take back half of what the school district has left at the end of the year. The borough puts that money into its school site selection fund, though it does from time to time pull from that fund for things other than school sites.

As for the pupil-count, the bill would set up a process for supplemental funding if a district winds up with substantially more students than its start-of-the-year estimates had anticipated.

The second of Gattis’ bills deals with forward funding of education.

“It is the policy of the state to appropriate funds for essential education programs at least one year in advance of the fiscal year in which the funds are to be expended in order to give school districts, regional educational attendance areas, state boarding schools, and the state centralized correspondence study program reasonably certain knowledge of the amount and nature of financial support that the state will provide in that fiscal year,” the bill says.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.