Himschoot's Priority: Funding for Schools

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Category: Local News

Created on Wednesday, 03 January 2024 16:01

By SHANNON HAUGLAND

Sentinel Staff Writer

When it comes to school funding, Sitka’s representative in the state House says the key words are “stable and predictable.”

Rebecca Himschoot (Sentinel File Photo)

“Stable and predictable funding is the number one thing we can do to improve student outcomes,” said Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, who represents House District 2 communities of Sitka, Petersburg and multiple Southeast towns from Yakutat to Prince of Wales Island.

Himschoot spoke to the Sentinel about the governor’s budget, which was released in December. She just retired from teaching in the Sitka School District, and in two weeks will start her second year in the Legislature, where she’s a member of the House Education Committee. 

She ran as an unaffiliated candidate, and is a member of the minority Alaska House Coalition.

During the year-end holidays Himschoot has held informal “constituent connections” at coffee shops and restaurants, as well as the ANB Founders Hall. The next session will be 3 to 5 p.m. Thursday at the Mean Queen restaurant.

Gov. Dunleavy’s budget proposes no increase in the base student allocation (BSA), the key component of school funding for schools throughout the state. The figure hasn’t been increased in the last eight years.

The present situation isn’t what Himschoot has in mind as “predictable and stable funding.”

“A top concern for a lot of us is the failure to fund the base student allocation,” she said. “Last year, the governor didn’t name a number for an acceptable increase, so the Legislature did their best to find a number, which clearly wasn’t the number the governor could support. ... It’s hard to know what’s acceptable to the governor.”

Last year, the Legislature approved what amounted to a $380 per student increase, but even that stopgap amount was cut in half by the governor’s veto.

Elaborating on the idea of “predictable” for state school funding, Himschoot said it could take many forms, including legislative approval of a figure early in the session to allow school boards adequate time to plan their budgets. 

“The trick with ‘predictable’ is not this default position of ‘you won’t be getting an increase,’” she said. “Inflation proofing would be a form of ‘predictable’ we could all work with.”

She added: “The districts are trying to make decisions that impact programs and class sizes and fundamental components of what schools do. And they’re not going to know until May what they’re working with.”

She said it’s possible to budget schools based on last year’s BSA but it’s the same figure as 2017. Since that time, inflation has gone up between 28 and 32 percent. “They’re getting about two thirds the bang for the buck they got in 2017,” Himschoot said.

A longtime education advocate, Himschoot cited a study completed for the Anchorage school district, which took into account the best education research to find the best-supported practices.

“What’s an appropriate class size, how do you best serve gifted kids? How do you best serve English learners?” she cited as examples. “They took those recommendations and worked backwards to say what the district needs to do to reach that sort of gold standard.” The estimate for improving and implementing those best practices would require a BSA twice as much as the current one, or $13,000 per student, she said.

The current starting point is zero, but a bill in House Finance proposes a $680 increase in the BSA, which could be moved through the Legislature quickly, Himschoot said.

“It would at least tell schools what they have earlier,” she said.

Last year Dunleavy sponsored a bill to pay teachers recruitment and retention incentives. It would pay teachers $15,000 in rural and remote areas, $10,000 in rural schools sufficiently linked to urban networks, and $5,000 in more urbanized areas. This year is the second in a two-year legislative session, so the bill remains active in the legislative hopper.

But Himschoot said the bill is problematic, despite the governor’s intentions.

“I think he sincerely wants more money for teachers, but I will say squeezing the districts to where they can’t pay people the way they want and coming up with a state bonus for three years is problematic in a couple of ways,” she said. “One, we can achieve the same thing through a BSA increase –– on top of that, I would be against it if it didn’t include para-educators ... without them the schools don’t function.”

Turning to other areas of the budget, Himschoot said the biggest problem with the governor’s plan for funding all state services is that it has a $1 billion shortfall.

“That leaves it to the Legislature to do the dirty work of balancing that budget,” she said. “And the idea of drawing on the constitutional budget reserve, which is down to less than $3 billion, from $16 billion more than a decade ago. We’re going to have to find places to cut. When the governor suggests putting more state resources into a dividend, rather than any other area of the budget, drawing on savings to do it, I’m not OK with that.”

She clarified she’s in favor of the largest dividend possible, but it must be “sustainable and affordable.”

Both the governor and Legislature are contending with a challenge of paying for programs to serve three times the number of Alaskans as there were when the pipeline was built, Himschoot said.

“We have more people making demands on a system that continues to go with the yo-yo funding you get from oil prices, and more than just prices, it’s the amount of oil in the pipeline.”

She touched on other areas for Southeast, including the need to fund replacement of the trooper vessel Enforcer, which has been mothballed. The single trooper vessel assigned to Southeast would have been useful in the response to the Wrangell landslide, she noted. 

Himschoot did see some bright spots in the budget submitted by the governor, including 30 new eligibility technician positions for the Division of Public Assistance, which has a longstanding backlog of people’s applications for food assistance.

But she said she’s glad to have the governor’s proposed budget released, and is ready to get started proposing changes.

“Senator (Bert) Stedman was exactly right, it’s a starting point,” she said. “The governor has given us something to work with, some things that are good and some things we’re going to have to change to try to meet the needs of the most Alaskans.”

Himschoot said she plans to be back in Sitka in February.