The Anchorage School District is laying off some staff and reassigning others after state and federal funding cuts, according to district officials.
In an email to staff and parents Tuesday, Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt blamed a recent move by the U.S. Department of Education to withhold about $6.8 billion in education funding across the country, including $14 million the Anchorage School District was expecting, as well as Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s line-item veto in June of over $50 million in state education funding, $4.3 million of which was headed to Anchorage schools. Bryantt also described a proposed change by the state school board to the way local municipalities contribute to their school districts as a “failure of leadership.”
“This is happening only because public education in Alaska is being actively undermined by unstable decision-making, delayed funding, and systemic negligence,” Bryantt wrote.
District officials, including Bryantt, were unavailable for further comment Wednesday and Thursday.
According to Anchorage School District spokesperson Corey Allen Young, the $14 million in federal funding cuts for the district announced June 30 — the day before the start of the fiscal year — are equivalent to 34.5 positions. Young said 15 teacher trainers will be reassigned to vacant classroom positions and five employees will be laid off.
“Through ASD classroom teacher vacancies and utilizing small amounts of funding sources, we were able to limit the actual layoffs,” Young said in an email.
Republican legislators who have supported Dunleavy’s cuts to education funding disputed what Bryantt had said in the email.
Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe of Big Lake said the Anchorage School District should have budgeted better.
“We sort of have a difference of opinion. You know, there are a group of people, including superintendent Bryantt, who think that the best way to solve this problem is to throw more money at it, which we have done for more than a decade, and we've continued to watch the outcomes for our children go down the tubes. Or maybe we should try something different,” McCabe said.
When crafting the budget for the upcoming school year, Anchorage School Board members assumed the district would not get all of the $700 per-student boost to the state’s education funding formula that state legislators approved, planning instead around a $560 per-student figure Dunleavy had proposed earlier. Several other school districts built their budgets around larger increases to the formula, known as the Base Student Allocation, or BSA. When Dunleavy’s line-item veto of the funding itself brought the BSA increase down to $500 per student, the Anchorage School District lost $4.3 million in expected funding.
Still, McCabe questioned where additional money for schools would come from and mentioned unfunded rural school infrastructure repairs as needing state support.
“We are focused on the outcomes of our children. The education industrial complex is focused on money,” McCabe said. “The problem is, is many parents have been taking their kids out of ASD and other schools because of the poor outcomes.”
In an opinion piece published last Friday, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Education Commissioner Deena Bishop pitted the educational reforms the governor has sought in recent years against the funding increases educators and administrators say are needed to keep schools functioning, asserting that parents are pulling their students out of neighborhood public schools in favor of charter schools and home schools.
Dunleavy said districts had prioritized educators’ jobs and keeping school buildings open over improving student outcomes.
“More funding for education without strong, learning-centered policy will not improve student outcomes, but targeted funding and reforms will,” Dunleavy wrote. “The hysterical reactions from some education leaders, such as the superintendent of the Anchorage School District, are merely rhetoric that distract from the urgent need for reform.”
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Löki Tobin, who chairs the state Senate’s Education Committee, said the situation would have been avoidable if districts had more state funding to absorb the impacts of the $46 million in federal funding cuts statewide that were issued July 30.
“Since our executive branch required all of our school districts to spend down their fund balances, essentially gutting their savings accounts, our school districts really don't have a lot of options when it comes to trying to smooth out some of the financial impacts,” Tobin said. “It's not just our largest school district that's going to be severely impacted, and has been severely impacted, it’s every community in which Alaskans reside.”
The Anchorage teacher’s union lost over 400 certificated educators this year, many of whom sought better pay and benefits in the Lower 48, Anchorage Education Association President Corey Aist said.
“Public education is being thwarted, attacked on various levels, both at the state government and also from our federal government now, and so it's been very challenging on educators to support students over the long term,” Aist said. “The services that are being eliminated by the federal dollars, federal grant funds, are those that support some of our neediest students.”
Considering a lingering budget shortfall at a meeting last month just hours after Dunleavy issued his line-item veto, the Anchorage School Board announced a hiring freeze for the district but opted to wait on further cuts to see whether legislators would override Dunleavy’s education funding veto.
Dunleavy has called legislators into a special session set for August to address education funding and his request to create a Department of Agriculture, but he asked Republican lawmakers not to show up for the first five days of the session, which could prevent a vote to override the veto.
