A budget passed by the state legislature could give the Juneau School District a $500,000 boost for 2016-17 school year. The spending plan is yet to be approved by the governor.
The Juneau School District is trying to make every penny count. School officials say the district has cut spending on students and laid off teachers over the past five to six years.
The district predicts it will need $82,303,340 to cover expenses next year. And that’s what district Superintendent Mark Miller calls a razor thin budget.
“What we’ve had to do over the last few years is make cuts because the amount of money coming in has been relatively stable but the amount that we have to spend to keep our district running per person is going up. So it’s required pretty massive cuts in the number of personnel,” Miller said.
Since 2011 the district has cut 105 staff positions. Some of those people were laid off, some resigned and some retired.
This year the district will give up about 10 more positions. About nine of those are teachers’ jobs. A district spokesperson said they all either resigned or retired.
The increased expenses the district is absorbing fall under cost of living. Miller said they have to keep up with increasing health care costs and pay raises.
“Teachers typically make a little bit more every year based on the number of years they’ve been teaching, which you would expect. It’s really difficult for a new teacher to do much more than just hang in there on an initial teacher’s salary, but they know that over time they’re going to make more,” Miller said.
Miller said 90 percent of the district’s money goes to salaries, so people are pretty much the only thing they can cut. The district has already committed to keeping a definite number of employees for the next school year, but Miller said they are dependent on that $500,000 increase in funding from the state.
The extra money comes from a bill passed in 2014 that promised to increase school funding for the 2016-2017 school year by about $50 per student enrolled. The legislature had cut that money from its spending bill earlier this year and Miller said he didn’t know what to do.
“To say you’re going to be a half a million dollars short … well, we can’t go back and tell somebody and say, ‘we were just kidding about giving you a job.’ We owe them that job,” Miller said.
Luckily for the district, lawmakers changed their minds and put the money back in the bill, which passed Tuesday.
“Fortunately, I think it played out as well as it could for education, at least for this year. And I appreciate, I think, kind of calmer heads prevailing,” Miller said.
Once the bill becomes law, the district will be safe in a budget that restricts them to larger class sizes, fewer teachers and fewer student activities — at least until it’s time to make a new budget next year.
“School districts in the state of Alaska don’t have the ability to float bonds or do school taxes or generate their own revenue. Other than bake sales and car washes, we really don’t have the ability to raise our own money,” Miller said.
Miller said that means each year the district’s budget is at the mercy of state and local government.
