About 200 Anchorage teachers received pink slips Wednesday after the Alaska’s Legislature missed its 90-day deadline to solidify the budget. As uncertainty over teachers’ job security around the state grows, teaching staff on Kenai Peninsula are retaining theirs. But, 30 unfilled positions are still in limbo.
As the Legislature goes into a special session, school districts hope they predicted as close as possible as to where the budget will land. Both the House and Senate have individually passed operating budgets, but have not agreed on a fiscal plan. Among several disagreements, education funding remains a sticking point.
The House wants flat funding while the Senate aims to cut education by 5 percent. That could leave the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District with a $5 million shortfall, something the district’s budget didn’t account for.
“The problem is we moved a budget forward based on status quo funding from the state,” Assistant Superintendent Dave Jones explained.
The district has already backfilled a $3.7 million budget gap, using about $1 million in reserves. About $2.6 million in cuts were doled out to fill the rest, eliminating about 30 positions. About 17 of those were teachers and tutors.
Unlike Anchorage and other districts, Jones explains the school board awarded contracts to remaining tenured and non-tenured teachers this spring, but 30 unfilled teaching positions remain in question due to a hiring freeze. Those jobs will remain unfilled to absorb any possible cuts coming out of the Legislature.
“We’re trading the certainty of knowing that we have our non-tenured staff coming back with the uncertainty of knowing if we’re going to have to move teachers around in buildings,” Jones added.
The open positions aren’t evenly distributed across the peninsula. Jones notes the district will try to keep teachers in their communities, but can’t guarantee anything. He declined to say which schools have the most openings.
The state accounts for about two-thirds of the district’s budget and the borough picks up the remaining third but is only allowed to contribute so much. The district has requested the maximum amount, about $3 million over last year.
As it waits for the numbers to roll in from the borough and state, Jones explains that qualified teachers won’t wait around.
“That’s the frustrating part of it is we work to attract the highest quality teachers, and we’d like to retain the highest quality teachers, but we can’t do that without a solid fiscal plan,” Jones said frustratingly.
The Kenai Borough Assembly is set to revisit its budget on June 6.
