This week, Kenai Peninsula school board members continued hashing out its spending plan for next school year. The talks come amid ongoing advocacy for more school funding at the local and state levels.
The clock is ticking for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District to send a balanced spending plan to the borough assembly by the May 1 deadline. The key word is balanced. The district expects to come up about $8.5 million short if it wants to maintain current programs and staffing levels next school year. That has the school board revisiting deep, unpopular budget cuts. Four schools, librarians and school pools remain on the chopping block.
Earlier this month, the board built three budget scenarios that assume different levels of funding from the Kenai Peninsula Borough. The borough is consistently the district’s second largest source of income, behind the state.
State law outlines a minimum and a maximum local contribution. The difference between the current minimum and maximum amounts is more than $30 million. The district plans to ask for the same amount of money it got last year. That’s more than what the borough is proposing, but below the maximum.
Borough Mayor Peter Micciche favors a boroughwide two-and-a-half percent year-over-year spending increase to keep costs roughly tied to inflation. During an assembly meeting last week, he reiterated his position that the state needs to be part of the solution.
“My goal is sustainability for the long term, because I'm sick and tired of the annual, everybody shows up, and no one has ever created a sustainable plan,” he said. “We have a sustainable plan at the Kenai Peninsula Borough, and I'm going to be quite firm about that, and if I have to veto stuff, I will.”
And lately, people have been showing up at borough assembly meetings to advocate for borough funding. Heidi Stokes is the principal of Chapman Elementary School in Anchor Point and has four kids attending district schools. She wants the borough to give the district the maximum.
“I need to be very clear that the level of funding that you choose directly determines the cuts the district is forced to make,” Stokes said. “While you may not decide which positions are eliminated, which schools are shuttered and which students miss out on course offerings, the funding decision itself creates these outcomes. Ownership of that impact cannot be deflected.”
Assembly members say they’ve gotten mixed feedback from the public. Some favor maximizing school funding, others do not.
Marnie Olcott does not. She’s the former CEO of the Challenger Learning Center, which closed last year due to financial hardship.
“Every household, business and organization in this borough must adjust when revenues fluctuate,” she told assembly members. “The school district should not be exempt from the same financial realities faced by the taxpayers who fund it.”
Funding advocates are also petitioning state lawmakers. Sterling Elementary School Principal Elizabeth Kvamme told members of the House Education Committee that budget cuts in recent years have required her to spend two hours a day teaching third grade English and kindergarten. And she says she’s worried because her school is on the chopping block this year – again.
“Our size allows us to provide individualized attention to each student,” she told lawmakers. “I know from my experience working in larger schools, but it will not continue to be a possibility to provide that same level of individualized attention when we consolidate into a larger school.”
Kvamme was testifying in support of a bill that would increase state funding to school districts through the base student allocation, or BSA. State lawmakers passed the first major increase to that amount last year, but it still falls short of inflationary changes.
Micciche, the borough mayor, is also the former president of the Alaska Senate. He says people shouldn’t count on more state funding this year.
“I think the probability of a BSA increase is essentially nonexistent,” he said.
That’s why he’s encouraging lawmakers to address the problem from new angles. He sponsored two resolutions that the assembly passed unanimously last week that target education funding.
The first asks for a temporary reprieve from a state law that punishes districts for closing schools to save money. The other asks for permission to freeze property tax assessments at 2026 levels for the next three years. Because property values impact education funding, freezing assessment values would prevent sudden fluctuations in how much money the borough would be on the hook for.
The resolutions are only requests. State lawmakers would need to actually change state law. And there’s less than two months to go until the end of the legislative session.
In the meantime, school board members continue to labor over what they all agree are difficult budget decisions. Here’s school board finance committee chair Sarah Douthit during the special meeting.
“These are difficult discussions, and these are people's lives, and these are my kids as teachers,” said school board finance committee chair Sarah Douthit. “We're doing the best we can to provide a budget document that has things on it that we can, we can do in order to preserve education in the district.”
School district and board representatives will meet with borough assembly members next month to talk through the proposed budget cuts and borough funding level. Assembly members must pass a balanced spending plan for the borough by the end of June.
