Opinion: How to save our schools

Originally published February 14, 2026 in the Anchorage Daily News. Please click here to see the original publication.

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The Anchorage School District recently released a draft budget outlining massive cuts that will take place if the state Legislature fails to inflation-adjust school funding this year. School districts across the state, including the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in our region, face similarly dire budget deficits. The state Legislature must take action to help ensure the Anchorage School District and other school districts around Alaska can close the gap created by inflation.

As state legislators, we want to be clear with parents, teachers and students: Our schools are our highest budget priority, and we are doing everything in our power to restore school funding and prevent an exodus of families from our state.

First, some background. Until last year, the Legislature failed to update the Base Student Allocation, or BSA, funding formula for schools, resulting in a per-student cut over time of more than $1,800. This is effectively a 20% cut in funding; districts across the state absorbed these cuts through massive increases in class size, school closures and eliminating programs like career and technical education. After building one of the best education systems in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s, years of cuts have decimated our schools to the point that many positions remain vacant because we can’t recruit teachers to work in impossible positions for low pay with no retirement.

Last year, we made significant progress addressing these shortcomings, restoring $700 per student of the Base Student Allocation and reversing 40% of the cuts inflicted over the past decade. That represented only a $20 per student adjustment from the previous year, which was not sufficient and did not even keep pace with inflation. Restoring less than half the funding that had effectively been cut in no way made our schools whole, and most districts that had budget reserves spent them in an effort to keep schools afloat. So here we are today, with districts out of savings and facing such massive cuts and class sizes that they create an unprecedented exodus of families leaving Alaska.

To the parents and teachers who have said you cannot endure these conditions, that you cannot in good conscience send your kids to elementary schools with more than 30 students in a classroom, or middle and high schools with more than 40 students in a classroom: We hear you.

As Anchorage legislators, we know we need to deliver $30 million to our school district to tackle inflation and prevent continued class size increases. Maintaining school sports and IGNITE costs a bit more, and we know that sports are important to sustain school attendance. On the April municipal ballot, we can and will all vote “yes” on the special education levy. And here in Juneau, our highest priority is and must be restoring education funding to keep pace with inflation and stabilize schools. Preventing massive class sizes is entirely possible — it’s a question of our priorities.

While we represent Anchorage legislative districts, we are equally concerned about the threats to districts statewide. An inflationary adjustment to the BSA protects Kenai, Mat-Su and other districts just as it will Anchorage students. The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District has a budget deficit of $8.5 million, and Mat-Su Borough School District faces a $22 million deficit. We’re all in this together.

We urge parents, teachers and business leaders to speak out, and to do so now. We know you’re tired after years of attacks on public education, but we have made significant progress building bipartisan legislative consensus about the value of our schools. We will continue to fight with everything we have to block class size increases in Anchorage, and we need the entire community to once again pull together to loudly advocate for education funding for our kids and our schools.

Sens. Bill Wielechowski, Cathy Giessel, Elvi Gray-Jackson, Löki Tobin, Forrest Dunbar and Matt Claman, and Reps. Chuck Kopp, Calvin Schrage, Andy Josephson, Zack Fields, Ted Eischeid, Alyse Galvin, Andrew Gray, Carolyn Hall, Ky Holland, Donna Mears and Genevieve Mina represent Anchorage legislative districts in the Alaska Legislature.