The Alaska Senate is planning to vote Monday on a new education funding bill, even as Gov. Dunleavy is calling for changes. That’s after a state Senate committee approved a new version of a bill calling on school districts to regulate student cellphone use.
The new version of House Bill 57 from the Senate Finance Committee includes a $700 boost to the base student allocation, the basic input into the state’s public school funding formula. It also includes a 10% boost to student transportation funding, a longtime priority for school districts facing rising costs.
School leaders, community members and others have said for years the state’s schools are underfunded, and school boards have been forced to slash staff and programs as lawmakers and the governor have struggled to come to terms on a long-term boost to education funding.
The revised bill comes a week after Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a prior bill adding $1,000 to the base student allocation and two days after an override vote failed. Dunleavy has said for years he’d veto any school funding bills that don’t include his preferred policy priorities and twice made good on that threat.
Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, who caucuses with the largely Democratic bipartisan Senate majority, says the new bill is an attempt to compromise.
“We talked about some of the policies that were in play, and there's quite a few of them, which ones seemed to be most universally acceptable, and threw them together,” Stedman said of the new bill.
Some of the policy items included in the bill would ease the process of creating and renewing charter schools.
Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said the bill “strikes a balance between having public policies that have been well-vetted and that will actually improve education outcomes in our public schools, and also provid(es) the desperately needed resources to stabilize our public school system and keep our class sizes limited.”
There are, however, some significant differences between lawmakers’ approach and a bill Dunleavy introduced after vetoing lawmakers’ last attempt.
The Senate version of the bill does not, for instance, limit the reasons school districts can terminate charter schools’ contracts, nor does it prescribe a new appeal process for charter schools that face termination. Those, along with a provision that would create a statewide open enrollment system that allows students living in one district to go to school in another, have faced opposition from Senate leadership.
The new bill also omits a funding increase for correspondence homeschool and $450-per-student incentive payments to school districts whose elementary-age kids read at grade level.
In a social media post Thursday, Gov. Dunleavy called on lawmakers to add those items.
“Let me be clear. If legislators make a few key edits, including restoring the reading grants, adding open enrollment, ensuring full funding for correspondence students, and including the four charter school reforms, I will sign this bill,” he said.
The bill is scheduled for amendments on the Senate floor on Friday.
If Dunleavy ultimately vetoes the bill, the predominantly Democratic coalitions who control the House and Senate could not override him without help from minority Republicans.
Rep. Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks, who objected to the prior bill’s large price tag, said the new bill looks more affordable.
“It doesn't appear to me to be the kind of the clear things that the executive (Dunleavy) is asking for, but it's certainly closer,” he said. “Hopefully, we'll get there. It doesn't feel like we're that far apart here in the building.”
Stapp said he’d like to see the governor’s open enrollment and correspondence school provisions added to the bill.
Rep. Jeremy Bynum, R-Ketchikan, one of three Republicans who crossed over to support an earlier compromise education funding package, declined to discuss the new bill in detail.
“We'll just have to see what the final bill ends up looking like,” he said.
The bill is expected to move quickly through the Senate and onto the House. Because the bill already passed the House — though at that point, it only included a requirement that schools regulate cellphone use — approval in the Senate would set up a single up-or-down vote in the House on concurring with the upper chamber’s changes.
