The Juneau School District is asking the Assembly for more than $2.5 million to resolve deficits ahead of the next fiscal year.
Alaska’s school funding formula allows local governments to contribute their own money up to a certain point. The City and Borough of Juneau has allocated the maximum amount of local funding to the school district annually for more than a decade.
School boards can also ask local governments for funding beyond that cap, and during last year’s budget process, the school board asked for $2.2 million. Now, the board is asking for an additional $2.5 million.
More than $1.2 million of that would go toward a growing transportation funding deficit. Transportation is funded on a per-student basis from the state, and Superintendent Bridget Weiss said declining enrollment led to a deficit in the fund last year. District leaders expect the deficit to grow at the end of this school year, since enrollment was once again lower than projected.
“When we went into COVID and we had a drop in enrollment, there was a hold harmless statute that supported us for a couple of years,” Weiss told the Assembly Finance Committee on Wednesday. “That was true for general funding, but it was not true for transportation funding.”
She said fuel costs have also gone up.
The other big item on the list is $750,000 for RALLY, the district’s after-school program. Weiss said many RALLY staffers work as paraeducators in schools during the day and then overtime at RALLY, which has driven costs up last year and this year. She said the program is experiencing the same hiring challenges as the rest of Juneau’s child care providers.
“Because of our negotiated agreement, that means we’re paying overtime, which is more expensive,” she told the committee. “If we pass those costs onto the family, then what we’ve discovered is it makes it unaffordable.”
Weiss said the funding would also go toward costs that have come up this year related to middle school wrestling, summer school and community classes for adults.
Weiss said if the Assembly doesn’t give the district the additional $2.5 million, the district would have to fill the gap with funds it hopes to spend on instruction next year.
“Our K-12 instructional money is the only other pot we have,” Weiss said in an interview. “We would have to use those instructional dollars to pay these deficits, and that would eat up some of our operating fund.”
Assembly member Alicia Hughes-Skandijs asked school board President Deedie Sorensen how much the school board had discussed the possibility of not getting the extra funding from the city.
“We have not spent an exceptional amount of time on these. We spent a bunch of time trying to decide whether or not we were going to make this ask of the Assembly,” Sorensen said. “Most of our budgetary discussions have been how much we need to cut in order to deal with the structural deficit.”
Some Assembly members pushed back against the request. Member Wade Bryson said the Assembly was being asked to provide an easy way out of the district’s budget problems.
“If you know that there are spots that are losing money, bring it to our attention so that we can do something about it instead of handing us a bill at the end and asking us to reward poor budgeting practices,” Bryson said.
But Weiss said the root of the problem is flat-funding from the state. The base student allocation, the amount of money per student school districts get from the state, hasn’t increased since 2017.
“This isn’t about bad budgeting. It isn’t about bad spending,” Weiss told the committee. “This is about K-12 education being underfunded, drastically underfunded.”
The finance committee voted to move an ordinance to allocate up to $2,540,737 to the full Assembly for a final vote, with members Bryson, Hughes-Skandijs and Maria Gladziszewski voting against it.
The school board’s first reading of next year’s budget is set for Tuesday.
