A pair of state House lawmakers are calling on their colleagues to reconvene to restore millions in funding erased by Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s line-item vetoes that they say was meant to achieve one of the governor’s signature priorities.
Among Dunleavy’s more than $225 million in line-item budget reductions was $5.2 million set aside for students in kindergarten through third grade.
That money was intended to achieve the goals of the Alaska Reads Act — namely, to help young students struggling to learn to read, said Rep. Alyse Galvin, I-Anchorage, who, alongside Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, penned an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News urging lawmakers to override the veto.
“What is hard to understand about this is that the READS Act was his pet legislation from two years ago,” the pair of minority-caucus lawmakers wrote. “The Act has been criticized as an unfunded mandate that sets new standards but withholds the means to meet those standards.”
Alaska has some of the lowest reading scores in the nation, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The Alaska Reads Act, unveiled by Dunleavy in 2020 and passed by a narrow bipartisan vote two years later, was meant to change that.
The Reads Act laid out a series of changes to the way Alaska’s public schools teach reading in grades K-3, including screening tests and intensive interventions for students who aren’t reading at grade level. It was based on a similar law that has shown success in Mississippi.
It came alongside a $30 increase in the base student allocation, the largest part of the state’s school funding formula — an amount that administrators say fell far short of the cost of implementing the bill’s requirements.
The $5.2 million included in the state’s operating budget would have provided districts with an extra $180 per student in kindergarten through third grade and an additional $100 per K-3 student in low-income Title I schools.
“We know how expensive it is to bring kids up to speed,” Galvin said in an interview. “We know how expensive it is when kids at fifth grade have decided they’re not learners, or they can’t get it, and that means they check out, and oftentimes that means they end up not graduating. And guess who pays for that? All of Alaskans.”
The Alaska Reads Act has shown some early promising results, according to official data. Dunleavy touted improvements in reading across the state tied to the Alaska Reads Act in a news release earlier this year.
“As these results are beginning to show, when we implement effective education reform, Alaska’s students are capable of success,” he said in the June 5 statement. (Some educators have raised questions about the governor’s claims, the Anchorage Daily News reported.)
In the Anchorage School District, the number of students achieving a key reading proficiency benchmark increased 10% last year, ASD Office of Management and Budget Senior Director Katie Parrott said in a phone interview.
“It was pretty remarkable,” she said, “to gain that much ground in reading proficiency in one year.”
But with the $5.2 million erased, nearly half of which would have gone to the Anchorage School District, Parrott said the district was left to fill the gap with general funds and savings from prior years.
Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Superintendent Clayton Holland said that the veto would result in further cuts to public schools already hamstrung by insufficient funding.
“We’re not cutting from literacy and reading, but there will be takeaways in other parts of our budget because of that,” he said by phone.
And across the state, “districts are already making cuts due to increased fixed costs,” said Alaska Council of School Administrators Executive Director Lisa Parady.
“For the Alaska Reads Act to make real improvements, there has to be investment,” she said by email.
For that reason, ASD budget director Parrott said she was “a little bit surprised” by Dunleavy’s veto of reading-focused funds.
“Just because it seemed to be a little bit inconsistent with the administration’s stated support for having those targeted investments in areas that we can directly impact education outcomes,” Parrott said.
A desire for targeted investments in education
Rather than broad-based funding increases, Dunleavy has repeatedly called for targeted investments in classrooms aimed at achieving specific goals, from improving teacher retention to boosting student performance.
In his annual State of the State address in January, he called on lawmakers to “break the cycle of just doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“That means putting a focus on outcomes such as reading,” he said.
He has used those calls for targeted educational investments to advocate for his legislative priorities, including a controversial proposal that would have provided classroom teachers with annual bonuses ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 per year. Here’s how he described his approach to improving education on the statewide Alaska Public Media call-in show Talk of Alaska in April.
“It can’t be a couple, a couple of dollars now, a couple of dollars next year without really targeting to help teachers and help kids,” he said.
Like Parrott, Galvin, the independent state representative who’s calling for a veto override, said the veto is confusing — because, she said, it eliminates the kind of targeted education funding Dunleavy said he wants.
“Not just, should it be targeted, but let’s go for his targets, because we know his targets are around helping those kids who are struggling reading,” she said. “And frankly, there are a lot of them.”
The governor’s press office pushed back on Galvin and Gray’s call to override the veto. A statement from Dunleavy’s press office pointed to $175 million in one-time funding for schools that did survive Dunleavy’s line-item cuts.
“The Governor included the one-time $680 BSA increase in the budget for school districts to address education costs. This funding can be used to address the costs for the Alaska Reads Act or other education priorities in a school district,” Dunleavy’s communications director, Jeff Turner, wrote in a prepared statement.
Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, an ally of the governor, said the Dunleavy administration was investing in reading in other areas — including by spending as much as $750,000 in an external evaluator to study the effectiveness of the Reads Act.
“I’m hoping that evaluation will also show us maybe some gaps and where we need to focus,” Hughes said by phone.
Other Republican allies of the governor described Gray and Galvin’s call to override the veto of K-3 funding as political posturing. Rep. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River, pointed out that Galvin voted against a grant to a state reading institute amid questions over its shifting mission, and both authors of the op-ed voted against the governor’s teacher bonus proposal.
“I guess my question is, why all of a sudden, are they interested in targeting funding when they weren’t before?” she said by phone.
‘Preserve general funds for savings and fiscal stability’
In his veto message, Dunleavy said he cut the reading-focused funding to preserve state money for “savings and fiscal stability,” similar to the reasoning he provided for many other vetoes. But that rings a bit hollow, said Senate Finance Committee co-chair Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, a member of a bipartisan majority comprising 85% of the state Senate that has often found itself at odds with Dunleavy.
Stedman said the budget that passed the Legislature put $400 million more into savings than the Dunleavy administration requested.
“You can’t, in my opinion, legitimately use the excuse he used, because we are ahead of his savings targets and continually strengthening the state’s position,” he said by phone.
But Stedman said overriding Dunleavy’s vetoes is no easy task.
“That’s, you know, good political thunder, but in practicality, it’s not going to happen,” he said.
First, it would require a special legislative session — not an easy ask of lawmakers during the heart of the campaign season. And then, it’d require three quarters of the full Legislature to vote to restore the cuts. That’s among the highest thresholds for a veto override in the nation.
And lawmakers have been hesitant to override Dunleavy’s vetoes. Just this past spring, lawmakers failed to override Dunleavy’s veto of an education bill that passed the Legislature by a combined vote of 56-3.
For their part, though, Galvin and Gray say it’s at least worth a shot.
Eric Stone covers state government, tracking the Alaska Legislature, state policy and its impact on all Alaskans. Reach him at estone@alaskapublic.org.
