School district superintendent addresses impact of state budget cuts

PALMER — Mat Su Borough School District Superintendent Dr. Monica Goyette addressed how Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget proposal would impact Valley Schools in a video broadcasted on Facebook Wednesday.

MSBSD has been holding budget open houses at schools around the district, and Goyette posted a video discussing the projections for the school district in the coming years that was recorded on Tuesday.

“We’re still the largest growing fastest growing area in the state of Alaska and I think that’s a great indicator of our economy that’s happening here, that things are still happening. We know 700 homes were built last year,” Goyette said.

Goyette also released a statement on the budget once the numbers came out Wednesday morning.

“While we anticipated reductions based on the governor’s early press releases, today is the first day we are seeing actual numbers. The Governor’s budget is a starting point in the process. The Senate and House will have their opportunities to pass a budget over the next few months of the legislative session. Throughout this process, MSBSD Administration will be working with our school board on the impact of these reductions to our programs and services to children,” Goyette said.

The MSBSD budget is supported by the Mat-Su Borough for a quarter of its revenue. Last year, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly forward funded education for a period of five years. Goyette said that she had received a letter from Mat-Su Borough Manager John Moosey in January detailing their budget support, the earliest she can ever remember getting finalized funding. Goyette prepared an optimistic, pessimistic, and realistic outlook on the budget moving forward.

“It’s difficult to cut $1.6 billion from the budget without impacting some of the largest line items which education is one of those. So I’m not going to talk about the optimistic revenue scenario, we’ll talk about the pessimistic and the moderate and in the pessimistic, which would be no one time money flat Base Student Allocation and of course the borough funding that we already know, we would start the year off with a 7.3 million dollar deficit and each year that grows with those budget assumptions, four years out we’d be at a $20 million dollar deficit,” Goyette said.

Goyette prepared the budget outlook based on $5,390 as the BSA into the future. One-time monies of $2.6 million from the state were among those cut by Dunleavy on Wednesday. Over the last decade, MSBSD has seen an increase of the cost of doing business by 12 percent, but an increase of revenue by only six percent.

“Just moving from year to year it costs us tremendously more to do business than it did last year and in general you can probably count around 10 percent increase in costs,” Goyette said.

One of the other major cost driving factors for MSBSD is the cost of providing health insurance. MSBSD is insured through the Public Employee Health Trust.

“This is something that is a crisis nationwide...Americans pay the most for health insurance in the world, and Alaskans pay significantly more than the lower 48,” Goyette said. “This quickly becomes a burdensome expense and really draws money away from our classrooms.”

Contact Frontiersman reporter Tim Rockey at tim.rockey@frontiersman.com.