State House leaders unveiled a revised high-priority education funding bill on Wednesday ahead of a floor debate in the full House tentatively scheduled for Monday.
The latest version of House Bill 69 includes a $1,000 increase to basic per-student funding for public schools next year, but it leaves out further increases and inflation-proofing included in earlier drafts of the bill.
Instead, the new version advanced by House lawmakers includes a number of policy provisions that leaders hope will be enough to avoid a veto from Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
“Progress is real and inspiring on education right now. It is fragile and incomplete, but we're moving forward,” said House Majority Leader Chuck Kopp, R-Anchorage.
Boosting state funding for public schools is a top priority for the largely Democratic bipartisan coalitions that lead the state House and Senate. Caucus leaders have said repeatedly that they’re pushing to pass the education bill on an accelerated timeline in an effort to provide certainty to school districts currently working on their budgets.
The first draft of the bill included no policy reforms. But Dunleavy has said repeatedly, including on a talk radio show last week, that he won’t sign an education funding increase unless it’s paired with reforms aimed at boosting student performance.
Some of the provisions integrated into the new education bill are similar to those proposed by Dunleavy earlier this year.
One is a three-year trial of a statewide open enrollment policy, which would allow students to apply to attend any school in their school district. Local school boards would be tasked with determining the capacity of each school, and spaces in each school would be allocated through a lottery system, with priority given to siblings.
Another would require school districts to regulate — but not necessarily ban outright — student cell phone use on campus, with exceptions for things like translation or emergency use.
The bill would also make a variety of changes to the laws governing charter schools, including one that requires school boards to make their charter schools’ periodic renewal processes “as simple as possible” and another that would speed the appeal process for new charter school applications denied by a local school board.
Minority Republican lawmakers offered four amendments, three of which were defeated in a 4-3 vote along caucus lines.
But Kopp, the majority leader, unexpectedly split with his caucus to add another significant change to the bill initially proposed by Dunleavy: a grant program that would provide school districts a $450 incentive for each student who reads at grade level or demonstrates improvement. Dunleavy proposed the grant program in January, despite vetoing a similar reading-focused funding boost last year.
House Minority Leader Mia Costello, R-Anchorage, who proposed adding the grant program to the new bill package, said it was an effort to achieve the goals of the governor’s 2022 Alaska Reads Act.
“I think that it is incumbent upon the Legislature to support a program like this,” she said. “Students who are not able to read are not set up for success in life.”
The bill does not include two other priorities proposed by Dunleavy that dominated legislative debates over education funding last year — a policy change allowing the state Board of Education to directly approve new charter schools and a teacher retention bonus program that would pay up to $15,000 per teacher per year. A dispute over those provisions led Dunleavy to veto a smaller school funding increase last year.
It also leaves out changes to the state’s funding formula Dunleavy proposed this year that would add funding for correspondence students and vocational education.
Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, said leaders were hoping to find a deal everyone could get behind.
“The goal is to find the places that we can agree on that hopefully get us to a bill that works for everyone,” she said.
Lawmakers have been negotiating with the governor’s staff in an effort to avoid a repeat of the 2024 veto.
But where the governor stands on the bill at the moment is unclear. His spokesperson, Jeff Turner, declined to share the governor’s thoughts on the bill Wednesday afternoon.
“Bills can and do undergo significant changes before being transmitted to the governor,” he said. “For that reason, we withhold comment until the bill arrives in the governor’s office and he has had time to review it.”
But asked whether the governor had an agreement with lawmakers on a package he would support, Turner said “discussions on education funding are ongoing.”
One place the bill might change, assuming it passes the narrowly divided House, is the Senate. Senate Education Committee Chair Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said she was especially skeptical of the open enrollment provision.
“If you have a neighborhood school, do you have an automatic seat there, or all those seats up for up for the lottery structure? I don't know, and I think that is a big open question that we need to have answered,” she said, though she stopped short of calling any policy provision in the bill a non-starter.
The state’s dire fiscal picture could also complicate the bill’s future. Senate leaders said Tuesday they weren’t sure the state’s deficit-ridden budget could support both a $1,000 increase in basic per-student funding and senators’ desire to pay a roughly $1,400 Permanent Fund dividend.
The increase to the base student allocation, the largest part of the state’s public school funding formula, is estimated to cost roughly $253 million. The reading grant program would add another roughly $22 million to the bill’s expected price tag.
Meanwhile, the state is facing budget deficits in excess of half a billion dollars to maintain essentially the status quo, Senate Finance Committee Co-Chair Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, said at a news conference on Tuesday ahead of the bill’s release.
“Before we start spending money that we don't have, we should be looking at raising money to pay for programs that we passed last year and look at those that we can pass in the future,” he said.
Senators have proposed bills that would reduce oil tax credits and subject some privately-owned oil and gas companies to corporate income taxes, but it’s unclear if those measures can garner support from lawmakers in the House, never mind a frequently tax-averse governor.
Some House lawmakers have suggested balancing the budget by reducing the PFD and drawing from the state’s rainy day fund, the Constitutional Budget Reserve.
