Two Alaska school districts filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Anchorage Superior Court against the state, its governor and its education commissioner over what they say is a long-running failure to adequately fund public education.
In the complaint, the Kuspuk School District and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District argue “the state is failing to meet its constitutional obligation” both to provide Alaska students “a sound basic education and meaningful opportunity for proficiency” in vital subjects, and “to fund schools and school districts at a level that is adequate to provide students with a sound basic education.”
The plaintiffs are seeking a declaratory judgment that the state is violating the Alaska Constitution by failing to sufficiently fund public education. They say the state is violating the plaintiffs’ and students’ rights to substantive due process. They’re also seeking an injunction directing the state to fulfill its constitutional obligations, and requesting a court-ordered adequacy study to determine what it costs to educate students.
“Alaska, we don’t believe, has ever done an adequacy study to really understand what it would take to allow Alaska students a fair opportunity to learn the skills they need to participate and contribute to society,” said Matt Singer, a trial attorney representing the plaintiffs. ”If you don’t know what something is going to cost, then you can’t have a conversation with the Legislature about how to fund it,” he said.
The lawsuit points to low proficiency assessment scores, reductions in teaching staff and the elimination of fine arts, career technical and vocational education programs as direct impacts due to years of chronic underfunding. It also cites dangerous conditions inside school buildings.
“The last eight years, we’ve experienced a governor that has put forward a zero dollar budget going into budgeting,” said Kuspuk School District Superintendent Madeline Aguillard. “That’s almost a decade of just starting at nothing and when you have to claw your way to even less than minimal funding, that takes a toll,” said Aguillard.
A spokesperson with the governor’s office deferred to the state Department of Law.
“The responsible path is legislation — not litigation,” Department of Law spokesperson Sam Curtis wrote in an email Tuesday night, noting that “we have not been served with this lawsuit and have not yet had an opportunity to review the claims.”
The education clause in Alaska’s constitution does not specify a dollar amount for education. Instead, wrote Curtis, the constitution “vests the power of the purse squarely in the Legislature and the Governor. The legislative session began today. That is where education policy and funding decisions are meant to be debated and resolved.”
It’s not a coincidence the suit was filed on the same day legislators convened in Juneau for this year’s legislative session, according to Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Superintendent Luke Meinert. “I think it sends the message that the work on education funding is not done,” said Meinert. “We’re calling on this year’s Legislature to continue to work on that issue. They have the power to do so. Nobody else does,” said Meinert.
Education Commissioner Deena Bishop did not respond to a request for comment as of Tuesday evening. When she was superintendent of the Anchorage School District, Bishop consistently advocated for increased state funding for public schools through a change to the state’s education funding formula. But Bishop changed her stance when she became education commissioner under Dunleavy, arguing that the state’s budget is strained and that she preferred a more targeted approach to increasing school funding, like providing more money for tutors.
In the past, Bishop has said her department is not responsible for allocating funds for education. “The levers that I can pull aren’t levers for funding,” Bishop said in a 2024 interview. “I don’t create the money. The Legislature creates that, but we can certainly support policy that would help support schools as their needs come up,” she said.
Caroline Storm, executive director of Alaska’s Coalition for Education Equity, a nonprofit organization that is helping finance the lawsuit, said that “legal action is not the only way, but it raises the public awareness.” Storm said years of advocacy from her organization and others simply “hasn’t moved the needle enough” in Alaska to pay for wide-ranging needs from curriculum to building maintenance.
Storm said the lack of financial support for public education should be central to this year’s election cycle. “In my mind I don’t frame that as using politics, but ensuring something that is in our constitution,” said Storm.
According to Article VII of Alaska’s constitution, “the legislature shall by general law establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the State.” For years, the complaint alleges, the state has failed to do so.
“This does not come as a surprise to me,” state Sen. Löki Tobin, an Anchorage Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said Tuesday. “In this conversation around adequate school funding, our local school boards have been bleeding,” she said.
“They have come to Juneau, they have talked to our commissioner, they have elevated the desperate need that they are under to have adequate state funding. We know that the state support for schools has been slowly diminishing,” said Tobin, who is also a member of a task force formed at the end of last year’s legislative session to address education funding, among other issues.
Alaska’s public schools receive funding from two state budgets. Capital funds pay for building maintenance, upgrades and construction. Money for operations, often referred to as the Base Student Allocation, or BSA, buys things like textbooks and pays for teachers’ salaries. According to the complaint, Alaska allocated $5,800 per student in 2015. Over a decade, the number had risen only 2.2%, totaling $5,960 in 2025.
“The state is failing in all regards,” said Singer. “In order to provide a basic sound education, you need a lot of different things,” he said. “One of the things is a safe school building with a roof and heater. Another thing you need is a competent teacher standing in front of a classroom educating young people.”
After years of relatively flat state funding for schools amid rising operational costs, Alaska lawmakers during the 2025 legislative session passed a $700 increase to the BSA, then gained enough support to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of the bipartisan education bill — and later overrode his veto of $50 million in education funding from the budget.
While advocates celebrated the funding increase, many education leaders have said it still falls short of what school districts need to effectively operate, and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Tuesday said the increase in the BSA was “woefully insufficient to keep pace with inflation, which had eroded purchasing power by 37% in the preceding decade.” After last year’s protracted battle over school funding, and with state revenues projected to be lower than expected, it’s unclear whether there’s enough traction in the Legislature to pass another increase this year.
There are more than 50 school districts in Alaska, and most are located within cities or organized boroughs, which have access to local tax revenue to help fund education.
Nineteen districts are nearly entirely reliant on the state for funds, because they serve rural, unincorporated communities where money from local taxes is simply not available to help pay for schools. Dozens of those school buildings are owned by the state education department, including in the Kuspuk School District, which straddles the middle stretch of the Kuskokwim River and covers an area roughly the size of Maryland in Western Alaska.
State assessment data on student performance within the Kuspuk School District “are dire,” according to the complaint. The numbers show 90% of the district’s 330 students during the 2024-25 school year were not proficient in English language arts, math or science. Aguillard said chronic underfunding from the state is having an outsized impact on districts like hers, where the student population is predominantly Indigenous.
Those students aren’t only struggling with classwork. For years, Aguillard said her district has had to pull funds from its operational budget to keep buildings open. Over the last two years, an investigation by KYUK Public Media, NPR and ProPublica uncovered a public health and safety crisis inside many of Alaska’s public schools and in particular, in rural schools that serve predominantly Indigenous student populations. In one school, bats occasionally fly through classrooms and the hallway. At a school above the Arctic Circle, maintenance staff struggled for years with a persistent toxic chemical leak from the heating system, and in several cases across the state, failing plumbing means kids have to leave school to go to the bathroom.
Dozens of studies cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency highlight negative impacts on student performance as a result of poor maintenance and conditions inside schools. The investigation found black mold inside several Alaska schools. Exposure can increase the risk of asthma and is linked to higher rates of absenteeism. According to the agency, leaking roofs and problems with heating and ventilation can also impact academic performance.
The situation isn’t unique to rural school districts, however. In an interview, Meinert described at length the tangible impacts a $5 million budget deficit has had in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, one of the three largest in the state.
“The state does have a responsibility to provide safe and adequate facilities for our students not only in rural Alaska but also in urban Alaska,” said Meinert. In the last five years, seven schools in his district have been forced to close due to a budget shortfall. Meinert said the district opted to outsource its custodial jobs and eliminate more than 70 positions. Since 2019, Meinert said, his district has terminated more than 300 teaching positions districtwide, which means class sizes have swelled to more than double what the National Center for Education Statistics reported for the state five years ago.
Meinert contends that a lack of state financial support within his district is also disproportionately impacting the minority student population. State assessments show that more than 76% of Indigenous and economically disadvantaged students in the district are not proficient in English language arts.
On Monday, Aguillard got word from an architect that most of the roof joints that hold up the roof of the school gym in Aniak are broken. “We are closing the high school immediately and beginning plans to demolish before it collapses,” she wrote in a text message. In the last three years, experts have said at least three buildings in her district should not be occupied.
Aguillard has also been scrambling with maintenance staff over the last two weeks. This winter, communities across the state experienced a prolonged and extreme cold snap in December and January. Eight of the Kuspuk district’s nine buildings could not open in time for students to return from the holiday break because there was no running water, heat or electricity. The majority of the buildings in the district are owned by Alaska’s education department.
”It’s unsettling,” Aguillard said. “Our buildings should not be shutting down so easily. It’s really just evidence of the decline of the capacity of those buildings,” she said.
