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Belated BSA
On Friday, the Senate passed HB 69, the education funding bill. A few hours later the House sent it to the governor. It's due back by the end of the month.
Since it was first introduced, the bill has changed a lot. It started out increasing the BSA by $1,000 this year, adding $404 each of the next two years, and inflation-adjusting into the future. The version the House sent us did just the first step, and threw in a fistful of policy measures. In the Senate Education committee we took out some of those that either didn't work or weren't written well. We also added a few of our own.
In Senate Finance, the state of Alaska's budget led to a vastly pared-down bill. The committee took out everything but the core provision: adding $1,000 to the BSA. Even that only passed on the Senate floor by the minimum number of votes.
The margin wasn't tight because folks think schools don't need the money. The nonpartisan Legislative Finance Division showed us all how much the purchasing power of school spending has eroded. If we put as much financial oomph into schools last year as we did in 2017, we'd have started last session with a BSA of $7,088. That's more than $1,100 higher than we're talking about for next year. Districts all across the state are looking at school closures and layoffs, to say nothing of the ludicrously large class sizes.
The reason there were no votes to spare is that we still don't know how to add $1,000 to the BSA and still balance the books. It's hard budget math. With a governor who will veto almost any revenue measure, the funds can only come from a few places. One is a big reduction to PFDs. Another is a huge reduction in state services. The third is the Constitutional Budget Reserve, which takes the same number of votes as overriding the governor's veto on a tax bill. None of those options works very well.
When we finally work out the dollars, there are probably some education policy steps worth taking. The governor has never made much of a case for his new focus on "open enrollment," which impacts very few Alaska districts. Plus it's something almost every district already does. And we've talked about the balance between encouraging charter schools and tying the hands of locally elected school boards before. On Friday I spoke about his proposal to crank up what we spend on correspondence schools. But there are some other worthy tweaks out there that we should pass. One that's important to me is heading off a proposed regulation change from the Department of Education & Early Development that would stop local municipalities from funding activities, buses, or school lunch outside the cap. That provision came out of HB 69, but I'm still focused on protecting Alaskans' right to support our schools.
So the work to fund K-12 education goes on. Unless we can come to some sort of arrangement with the governor, he says he'll veto adding $1,000 per student. If we can't override him, I'll work to send him another bill we can get into law. Ideally it will be something he signs. Negotiators from his office and the legislature haven't gotten there yet, but I'm not willing to back down and settle for another year of one-time funding.
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