Just when you thought the public-school funding issue was resolved by last year’s legislative passage of HB57, the good folks in the Anchorage School District (ASD) are pleading poverty again and have their hand out, asking for more money. This time, they want access to a one-time bonus the legislature passed in the just-completed regular legislative session; funds that are to be delivered by August 31. Evidently, that timing isn’t good enough for the ASD. They want their money now and are none too happy that the governor isn’t getting it to them quickly enough.

Administrators say that the funds are needed to hire additional teachers and fund programs that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. They say if they wait until the legislature’s deadline in August, it will be too late to spend the funds for the coming school year.

While they do make a valid point, you can call me skeptical when I hear about the dire financial shape they are in. The ASD administrators haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory with their management of state revenues over the past couple of years.

The reason for the skepticism is that we were assured in the 2025 legislative session that HB57, which greatly increased public school funding, would solve the annual education funding problems, yet here we are again with another school district pleading poverty.

The ASD claims its budget woes are a result of a drop in student enrollment. The state allocates funding to school districts based on each student they educate. They do this using a funding coefficient called the Base Student Allocation, which was greatly increased last year. That should have funneled more money to the ASD, but their enrollment keeps dropping, meaning they receive less overall money from the state, despite the additional funding the legislature allocated in HB57.

Since the year 2000, the Anchorage population has climbed by ~30,000, but school enrollment has declined by over 7,000. Anchorage schools have experienced the same problem we see statewide. Many parents are choosing home and private school options to educate their kids and no longer want to send them to big-box state-funded schools.

Enrollment in state-funded schools is declining. I would be sympathetic to their arguments for more funding had the Anchorage School District been a good steward of the state money it already receives, but it hasn’t. The ASD has been particularly bad at managing how it spends the resources we (owners of the state government) give it.

In January of this year, just one month before the February school closure announcement, the ASD announced the opening of a brand-new school. The old Ocean View Elementary building had been completely torn down, and a new school had been built in its place, using the old school’s name. The new building was constructed with a budget of $50 million.

Today, just six months later, the ASD says they have a $90 million budget shortfall, most of which is the result of their decision to build a brand new elementary school. Given the long-term trend of declining student enrollment in Anchorage, it was a terribly wasteful decision to build this new school. It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah on the part of the ASD to waste this money, then come back to the state and plead poverty, asking for another handout.

In their desperation, the ASD conjures up images of a drug addict who is asking their dealer for just one more hit, saying if they get it, they will be ok. We all know how that always works out. Evidently, since the voters up in Anchorage keep electing Democrat legislators, they are ok with this kind of fiscal mismanagement, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us need to go along with it.

Whether school administrators will admit it or not, K-12 education is undergoing a transition. Parents are moving their children to opportunities outside the state-funded system. They are choosing homeschooling, religious schools, and charter schools. This trend has been going on for more than two decades and will continue. Public schools will never go away, but the new normal will end up being some combination of private education opportunities and a much-reduced government-funded education system.

School districts around the state need to find ways to deal with the decreasing revenue that comes from this trend. If that means reducing the number of schools and staffing they administer, so be it. There are better ways of educating our children; it is now time for our Legislature to support these new options instead of continuing to throw money at districts with poor fiscal management.

(Disclaimer: For better or worse, Seward’s Folly is a graduate of the ASD, class of 1977. Critics of this blog might say that explains a lot.)

The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.

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