School funding effort may still fall short

MAT-SU — A joint legislative task force recommendation that calls for increasing state funding for education by about $170 by 2013 may not go far enough to satisfy the Mat-Su Borough School District.

The Joint Legislative Education Funding Task Force had been meeting over the summer and last week finalized its recommendations, which include increasing state funding of special needs students.

For the Mat-Su district, more money for intensive needs students is needed, but the task force’s final recommendations, based on a 2005 University of Alaska Anchorage study, still won’t cover its costs, said board of education member Sarah Welton. The local school district is suing the state Department of Education and Early Development ove changis in how the state determines students are eligible for special needs consideration. The district estimates it lost about $4.3 million in special education funding for the 2006-2007 school year because of the changes.

“It is still less than what is being paid out,” she said of the task force’s report, which calls for intensive needs funding to increase from five times that of a regular student to nine times in 2009, 11 times in 2010 and 13 times in 2011 and beyond. “What we expend goes way beyond what the state has provided. We’ve been spending $75,000 to $100,000 [per school year] for special needs students.”

At the 2006-2007 state allocation of $5,380 per student, special needs at the recommended level would in 2011 be worth $69,940 per pupil. The Mat-Su Borough School District is one of the state’s larger school districts serving about 16,000 students. Anchorage is the largest with about three times as many students.

Although it may not be fully funding special needs for every district, the task force’s recommendations go a long way toward providing a financial boost for Alaska schools in the areas they need them, said Rep. Mike Hawker, R-Anchorage, who chairs the committee.

“The special needs funding is [an area of focus], where we matched the money that’s going to the urban districts and rural districts,” he said. “That’s where the formula had gotten out of calibration over the past few years.”

The recommendations also include an across-the-board $100 increase in per pupil funding and allocates more money to attracting talented teachers to more rural areas.

“It is a step in the right direction,” Welton said. “I think the task force was really good to bring things to light. … If everything we recommend is passed into law, we’ve established a stable platform of adequate funding for the next several years.”

Mat-Su officials may have wanted more from the task force’s recommendations, but they chose not to work with the task force when it asked for input, Hawker said.

“I was absolutely flabbergasted they did not participate,” he said. “Mat-Su schools chose not to participate in this process. … They get a huge benefit from this. We called them, we e-mailed them, we repeatedly invited them to participate.”

That is true, Welton said. Mat-Su officials decided not to testify or answer questions for the task force. One of the questions nearly all the districts involved were asked was at what level were their local communities funding education.

“We just stayed out of it,” she said. “We did not want the Borough to look bad [about local funding not being at a maximum level]. … I think that was very shrewd on our part to observe what was happening with other districts.”

Because Mat-Su taxpayers are not at the maximum limit of what they pay to the school district, the fear was that could be held against the district in how any final recommended funding increases would be distributed, she said.

“We really do have to do our own work here in the Valley,” she said. “I think a lot of people think they are paying for all of the schools. They are paying for a portion of the schools [locally]. The state pays the majority of how schools run.”

One aspect missing from the task force’s recommendations is how the state would pay for an additional $36 million marked for next year and building to about $170 million by 2013.

How to pay for the recommendations is the Legislature’s job, Hawker said, adding the task force report will likely be a hot-button issue in the next session.

“A way to both implement and sustain the funding [in the recommendations] is something the Legislature must do,” he said. “How to do that has not been addressed. … It will certainly be a priority issue.”

Contact Greg Johnson at 352-2268 or greg.johnson@frontiersman.com.