Sitkans Add Voices For School Funding

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Created on Friday, 31 January 2025 15:09

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Students and adults testified to a legislative committee Wednesday on the importance of increased school funding across the entire state.
    Sitka Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, chair of the House Education Committee, helmed the hearing, with Sitkans and a host of other Alaskans taking turns speaking to the legislators in a telephone conference. About a dozen locals took part from the Legislative Information Office on Katlian Street, and others joined in on their own phones.
    Years of budget cuts have left some Sitka programs threadbare, said Sitka High senior Jasmine Wolfe, student council president.
    “I’ve seen my school district make cut after cut just to try to stay afloat,” Wolfe said in her testimony. “They have managed as best they can with the resources given, yet they are still unable to balance the budget and provide an acceptable learning environment due to increased class sizes, outdated technology, lack of staff and so much more. I know that my story is not uncommon, and there are thousands of students across the state with similar stories… I’m afraid of the future of my school district, and I’m afraid of the future of our state if we continue to underfund education.”
    The hearing was on House Bill 69, which Himschoot introduced last week. It calls for an immediate $1,000 per student increase in state funding for schools. In addition to an immediate boost to school funding, the legislation would increase the Base Student Allocation (BSA) by $1,808 over three years. The current BSA is $5,960 and has not risen with recent inflation.
    “As a high school senior, I witnessed our state government devalue and drastically underfund education over the past four years,” Wolfe told the legislators. “As much as I would love to stay in my home state and continue my education, I’ve made the hard decision to move out of state to a state that values and funds education. Underfunding education will continue to drive students and residents out of state to raise their families. Our state will continue to find it difficult to find and hire educated and skilled workers. I encourage you to set a better example.”
     The state provides most of the school district’s funding, but it hasn’t kept pace with inflation. The Sitka Assembly supports local funding “to the cap” allowed under state law, but increasing costs have caused the Sitka School District to cut many positions in the past several years, threatening a number of school programs.
    In an interview with the Sentinel, Wolfe expanded on her remarks to the House committee. “It’s not just not funding education, but it’s not supporting Alaska and its future,” she said.
    “As youth, we’re told time and time again, ‘You are the future, you are our future.’ And yet, when it comes down to things like education in state funding, we are not prioritized. And it’s that contradicting thing – I am actually planning on going out of state for my education, my post secondary education, which was not my first choice, and I am really sad to have to leave my home, but I am going to a state that prioritizes education.”
    Olivia Skan, a member of the SHS student council, said she couldn’t seek a position on the Alaska Association of Student Governments this year because the Sitka school district isn’t able to pay for her travel to and from Anchorage. Cuts have also forced students to choose between elective classes and graduation requirements, Skan noted, which has diminished the quality of education for Sitka students.
    “The lack of funding is leading to a future devastation in our economy as people leave and our citizens lack the tools to succeed,” she said. “I have not been in a fully funded school since I was in kindergarten, and all of these problems are reflective of that.”
    Himschoot, who was unopposed for election to her second term in the House, was a teacher in the Sitka School District for 20 years. She ran as an independent and is a member of the bipartisan caucus that controls the House.
    The lack of reliable and predictable funding for education has been a problem for school districts for years, and passage of HB69 would be a step toward solving this problem, she said.
    “With more funding stability, school districts can begin to restore programs that help children to become college, career and life ready and attract the best-qualified educators possible in every child’s classroom,” Himschoot said in a recent news release. “Additionally, many larger districts are struggling with large class sizes, which in most instances does not lead to the optimal learning environment.”
    Himschoot said the proposed $1,808 BSA increase over three years is based on inflation since 2011. One-time increases of $680 per student have been approved in recent years, but attempts to implement permanent BSA increases have been vetoed by Gov. Dunleavy.
    “The reason we chose 2011 is that was the peak value year of our investment in education in the state,” Himschoot said. “So we want to go back to our peak investment year of 2011, and to do that we need to put in $1,808.”
    The bill would add inflation proofing to the BSA for the next three years and beyond, using a four-year rolling average. That’s in addition to the $1,000 in FY26, $404 in FY27 and $404 in FY28.
    Sitka teacher Joe Montagna, president of the Sitka Education Association, told the Sentinel that an increase in state funding for education is critical.
    The upcoming fiscal cycle “doesn’t look good,” he said. “It looks like more teacher cuts, more programs cut, which, of course cuts off what’s available to our kids in this community. And it’s just sad, and our population is getting smaller, and people need a reason to stay here… It’s disheartening to see that there are not programs offered that would interest them and get them to stay here and love living in Sitka.”
    For teachers and other district staff, cuts are “super stressful,” Montagna said. “You’re not quite sure if you’re going to have a job next year, and it’s an uneasy feeling for the community to live with, again, not knowing who their teachers are going to be next year, but it’s really about the programs and what positions will be available. So this bill (HB69) certainly shines a lot of light on this, and it’s long overdue.”
    Without the extra per-pupil funding from the state, either in the form of an increase to the base student allocation or as a one-time payment, the Sitka school budget for the upcoming year has a $4 million deficit, School Board President Phil Burdick said in a letter to the Assembly earlier this month.
    Program cuts have already had major impacts at Sitka High, Olivia Skan said.
    “Our class sizes have drastically increased, we could be potentially losing our music and art programs,” she said. “We are losing opportunities to travel and hold positions on state boards for student government. We would be losing additional electives. We could be losing, like CTE (career and technical education) classes. And so it’s a really big deal for everybody in the high school.”
    Public testimony at Wednesday’s long-distance hearing went on for about three hours. About a dozen Sitkans were present at the LIO in support of the bill, a handful of others called in to the meeting to express support, but a few, from other parts of the state, said they were concerned that more school funding would take away from the amount available for other needs in the state.
    Beth Short-Rhoads, formerly an educator, was one who called in to testify in favor of HB69.
    “Ask yourself, as a sworn member of the Alaska Legislature, do you strive to do what is right for Alaska students, or are you seeking to alter what the framers of Alaska Constitution had in mind when they wrote the legislature shall, by general law, establish and maintain a system of public schools open to all children of the state and may provide for other public educational institutions? Schools and institutions so established shall be free from sectarian control,” Short-Rhoads said.
    Sitka High teacher Ariel Starbuck also testified, calling for more state support for schools.
    “We stretch every dollar, we exhaust every resource, and it’s never enough,” Starbuck said. “Our classrooms are overcrowded, our materials are outdated, and our teachers, who dedicate their lives to these young students, are leaving the profession because they cannot afford to stay.”
    The impacts of cuts have rippled outward from schools, impacting other facets in the community, said Bridget Hitchcock, who has two children in the Sitka schools.
    “Last year, our district lost 18 positions. These are faces and friends and community members and soccer coaches and people that really contribute to the community, and it was a heartbreak to see these people leave,” Hitchcock testified. “We’ve lost school librarians; we lost all our business classes in the high school; we lost all but one section class of computer science.”
    She continued: “I’m in the health care field. We use a ton of travelers at our health care facility because we don’t have nurses, we don’t have physical therapists. We need to have a base for these students to get the classes that they need to go on to these other educational fields.”
    HB69, which was introduced Jan. 24, is now in committee, with further hearings scheduled for February. A full recording of Wednesday’s hearing is published online by KTOO.