School Funding

School Funding

For the first time in years, the Assembly this year did not fund Juneau schools to the maximum amount allowed under state law. Do you categorically support funding to the cap? Why or why not?

Maria Gladziszewski

I would like our community to fund education to the most that we can. I would like us to go back to funding to the cap. It might not be immediately. I think it is absolutely something we need to pursue. Again, I’m a very practical, detailed problem solver and won’t make promises categorically. I will tell you that is vital to me. I am here because of education. I’m here because I got an education and I want that for our community, for our kids and for our grandkids to be able to live here.


Norton Gregory

I do support our schools. I support our teachers and our students, and I believe that it’s very important that the Assembly ensure that the students and the teachers have all of the funding that they need, so that they can have the resources that they need to continue operating in a healthy manner. Yes. We should support to the cap if possible.


Tony Yorba

The reason that it wasn’t funded to the cap, I think speaks to the level of the seriousness of our budget situation. I would like to say that ‘Yes, we would fund schools to the cap’ because of the importance of our schools. But having said that, can we do that without causing grievous harm to other areas of Borough responsibilities in the delivery of services? I don’t know that. Being an outsider to the budget process, I don’t think that I can categorically say that we would fund it to the cap because it might be there’s just no way for us to do it.


Jesse Kiehl

Since I moved to Juneau, about 16 years ago something like that, it has always been a source of great pride that we support our public schools to the maximum extent allowable. Over the last five years with stagnant and declining state funding for schools, we have seen the school district cut even more deeply than the city has had to. And it’s gotten to the point where that’s impacting education.I was very disappointed this last year that we couldn’t get even enough additional city contribution to stop the K-5 class sizes from rising. I’m talking to friends who have kids in grade school who have ridiculous numbers of students in the classroom. There comes a point where you’re not teaching, you’re doing crowd control. And it boggles my mind how the teachers get anything into those kids. Somehow they’re doing it.

So I think the school district is going to need the city to step up to the maximum extent allowable by law just to keep class sizes from rising again next year. Their fixed costs do not go down year over year. I can tell you that state funding shows no sign of going up next year. That difference has to be made up somewhere. And it’s one of my priorities as an Assembly member to do all we can to educate our kids. That’s Juneau’s future, and it’s not something I think is negotiable if we want a strong community going forward.


Debbie White

I do support funding to the cap, but I think we also need to look at the school district budget and figure out and how to get this money into the classrooms. Our priority is the children, not the administration.


Josh Warren

As a student who was born in Juneau, raised in Juneau and educated in Juneau, probably the top priority for me in running for assembly is fully funding schools. So yes, I categorically support fully funding education. One of the main reasons I decided to run is that this is the first year in a long time we haven’t and I think outside of emergency services I think it’s the first duty of the city is to fully fund education.


Kory Hunt

I think education is a very important thing. But we have a lot of schools, and I think that we might be able to do without some of what we’ve got at the moment. It’s more important to have quality education than to have quantity. I think hiring teachers that can handle the jobs, actually educate the children, the students is more important than — so anyway, I don’t think we necessarily have to fund everything to the max. But that is definitely an option.


David Fox

An equipment malfunction resulted in no audio for this question. In place of the transcript, this is Fox’s response according to the reporter’s notes.

Fox says he supports 100 percent funding of schools.

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