School funding again took center stage at this week’s Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly meeting in Seward. The community is bracing for cuts to local schools as assembly members consider how much money to give the school district, and the meeting brought the group face to face with students with a lot to lose.
The borough assembly met in Seward this week, less than three miles away from Seward Middle School, which the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District plans to close this summer. It’s one of many planned cuts intended to balance out a multi-million dollar deficit. Other cuts hitting Seward students include distance learning and the defunding of the high school pool – the former home base of Olympic gold swimmer and Seward High alum Lydia Jacoby.
Local funding advocacy comes as borough assembly members prepare to build the borough spending plan for the fiscal year that starts in July. Last year, about two-thirds of spending from the borough’s catchall general fund went to local schools. But members haven’t decided how much to spend this year.
The school district wants an inflationary bump to what it got from the borough last year. That still comes with millions in cuts to programs and staff. That’s why others are asking the borough for the maximum funding allowable under state law, also called the ‘cap.’
Tara Craytor wants the borough to fund to the cap. She’s a Seward parent and coach with the Seward Tsunami Swim Club.
“This passing and moving the blame of not enough money to pay for education, from school, to school district, to borough, to state, is not fair to our children,” Craytor said. “They are suffering now. Education is not a business. It is a human right.”
A handful of Seward students also turned out to push the borough for maximum funding.
Ninth grader Hazel Dickinson asked assembly members to look past dollars and cents. She says the difference between the borough’s proposed budget and the maximum funding allowable is enough to cover the district’s forecast $8.5 million deficit, and then some.
“These numbers show that the current funding level is not just a statistic, but something that directly shapes the quality of education and opportunities available to every student in the community,” Dickinson said.
Seward High School Student Council Vice President Axel LaRock had similar thoughts, emphasizing the collateral damage to students.
“We urge you to not just think long-term, but short-term as well, because these budget changes affect people's lives today,” LaRock said. “Please consider funding to the cap, or the maximum you can, because funding our schools today means investing in outcomes tomorrow.”
Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche has said the borough won’t give the school district maximum funding this year. He says the borough can’t afford to keep bailing the state out, and that advocacy needs to be concentrated on state lawmakers to fix what he says is a broken system.
“This looks like a little bit of a scattershot, as opposed to staying on task with the things that can really change funding education for the long-term,” he said.
Micciche’s comments came during debate on one of two agenda items brought forward by assembly members Willy Dunne and Cindy Ecklund with the goal of boosting funding for local schools. Both efforts failed.
The first would have asked voters to scale back a borough sales tax break. The borough’s 3% sales tax only applies to the first $500 of a single purchase – the most you pay in sales tax on a big ticket item is $15. The ordinance would have doubled that cap to $30 on purchases of $1,000 or more.
All of the borough’s sales tax revenue goes to the school district under local law. But borough voters have consistently rejected different iterations of the proposal.
The $500 cap was set in the mid-1960s. In the subsequent decades, there have been multiple unsuccessful attempts to increase that cap. As recently as last October, borough voters killed a ballot proposition that would have adjusted the cap for inflation each year.
Micciche says assembly members should stop putting the issue before residents who’ve already decided at the ballot box.
“We work every day to get trust from our constituents, and one of the things they fail to trust us on is when you just don't listen,” he said.
Dunne, one of the co-sponsors, says that even though last year’s ballot proposition failed, the 55-45 percent vote indicates people are interested in the topic.
“There are a substantial number of voters who like the idea,” he said. “It's not a majority, or it hasn't been a majority, but without introduction, there's no way for the public to weigh in on this.”
The assembly voted 7-2 against introducing the proposal. If introduced, the proposal would still have required another meeting and public hearing before a final vote.
The assembly also killed a nonbinding resolution that would have formally supported a state bill increasing the base amount of money school districts get per student, also called the base student allocation, or BSA. The amount has been a hot button topic in Juneau, as public education supporters say the rate hasn’t kept up with inflation.
Micciche says the resolution doesn’t address the larger fixes needed to how the state funds education.
“And that is a repair of the foundation formula,” he said.
Dunne, who also co-sponsored the resolution, wasn’t deterred.
“Whether it passes the state legislature or not this year, I think it just is a show of support for students, support for education, that we are asking the legislature to increase the base student allocation to an acceptable level,” he said.
Joshua Girard is a paraprofessional at Seward Middle School. He says he’s advocated for a BSA increase in Juneau multiple times. This year the first school he worked at and the school he currently works at are closing.
“Two homes lost in one fell swoop,” he said. “So that was lots of fun that night. But I just really want to make sure that this goes through. I want to see everybody and encourage everybody to promote this as much as possible and continue to try and increase funding at the state level.”
The resolution failed 6-3.
The assembly has until the end of June to pass the borough budget, including school funding. Before then, the assembly will hold multiple public hearings on the proposed budget.
