Teachers, parents, students and community members showed up to Kenai Peninsula schools Wednesday morning dressed in red for a “walk-in,” a demonstration in support of public education funding.
Homer High School teacher Winter Marshall-Allen directs a crowd into the school, repeatedly chanting “raise the BSA.”
Marshall-Allen said she and teachers wanted to come together to show the importance of education to the community. Rather than the traditional walk outs that have happened at high schools across the state, the walk-ins are designed to promote the same message without disrupting the school day.
“We value it so much that we continue to persevere through the deficit and of funding and staffing and of resources in order to provide the best that we can with the resources that we currently have allocated to us,” she said.
The community action is in response to a failed attempt to raise the Base Student Allocation, the amount of funding per student the state provides for public education. The BSA has not had a meaningful, permanent increase since 2017. As a result, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District approved a budget with nearly $8 million in cuts.
The event was organized by the unions that represent teachers and support staff on the peninsula. Many former educators turned out for the walk-in at Homer High, including Debi Poore, a retired longtime teacher at Paul Banks Elementary School. She said the cuts don’t just affect the schools and students.
“I cannot imagine a school without [a] theater program, without a swimming program. The community relies on those also,” she said, “we've watched a decade of cuts to public education. And it's, it's wearing away at our community.”
From Seldovia to Seward, schools hosted similar walk-ins. At two Soldotna elementary schools, teachers cheered and chanted for a BSA raise in their parking lots as students arrived for school.
LaDawn Druce is the president of the teacher union, and organized today’s event.
“I’m just pleased that it looks like most sites that I’m aware of did make an effort to participate,” she said, “and that was the goal, was for people to in a sense kind of make it their own, but also the goal of letting people know we’re involved in this conversation, we obviously do care, we obviously want the governor and the legislators to do better and do right by our students.”
She said her message for legislators is that schools can’t carry on if funding stays the same.
“I honestly don’t believe that public education in this state…that we can keep doing it like this,” she said.
As the end of the legislative session nears, lawmakers are considering a one-time funding boost to schools equivalent to a $680 BSA increase. That line item was included in the State House’s version of the operating budget passed earlier this month, and is also a part of the Senate’s draft budget currently under consideration.
