The Anchorage School District is preparing to face another significant budget shortfall for the upcoming school year. ASD Chief Financial Officer Andy Ratliff said the deficit would likely be between $64-84 million at a Sept. 27 joint meeting of the Anchorage School Board and Anchorage Assembly.
“Not a very uplifting picture at this point,” Ratliff said.
Ratliff’s projection comes early in the budgeting process. The School Board won’t vote to approve the district’s budget until the end of February.
Ratliff said enrollment decline of about 5,000 students in Anchorage and unstable state funding have contributed to the deficit. The school board could vote to spend down available savings, shrinking the deficit by about $20 million. If the district had to rely on staff reductions alone to make up the shortfall, Ratliff said that a quarter of the district’s workforce could be cut.
“If we do have to make those significant of reductions, then frankly, I’m not exactly sure where we go from there,” Ratliff said in an interview. “It’s going to have to be a combination of everything across the board, and services are going to look completely different than they do now in our schools.”
Last year, the district proposed cutting almost 100 jobs and popular classroom programs to make up a nearly $100-million budget deficit, but reinstated most of those jobs after receiving a one-time funding boost from the state.
The last significant increase to the Base Student Allocation was in 2017. The BSA is the state formula used to determine how much funding school districts will receive from the state.
Ratliff said if the BSA had kept up with inflation, it would be about $1,500 higher. But he said an increase of about $900 by fiscal year 2026 — along with depleting the district’s savings — would return funding to pre-inflation levels.
Tim Rockey is the producer of Alaska News Nightly and covers education for Alaska Public Media. Reach him at trockey@alaskapublic.org or 907-550-8487. Read more about Tim here.
