Education

A crowd of teachers filled the Thunder Mountain Middle School library earlier this month. 

Dressed in Juneau Education Association t-shirts and vests, they voiced their misgivings to the school board about contract negotiations.

Deborah Rakos has taught at the district for 25 years. She said the district’s proposed pay scale is divisive and favors certain levels of experience.

“I’m looking at bringing home less money next year,” Rakos said. “In the meantime, the cost of living in Juneau continues to rise, and we all need to be able to pay our bills.”

Johnson Youth Center teacher Janette Gagnon said she’s now finding it difficult to recommend prospective teachers work for the district.

“If negotiations continue to drag out this time and again next time my faith in the district is getting shattered,” she said.

Electra Gardinier sat in front of board members with a two-month-old baby on her hip. She and her husband are both teachers raising three children. She said the low pay and high cost of living in Juneau means her husband needs to work a second job to make ends meet.

“Three nights a week, he works 13-hour days so that we can do extravagant things like pay for our health insurance,” she said.

They’re pushing the district for better pay and benefits against a backdrop of uncertain state funding. 

Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bill that increased the state’s per-student allocation by $1,000, and the Legislature is considering several other school funding bills. 

School funding in Alaska hasn’t gone up significantly since 2017. Because of this and other budget issues, the district consolidated its middle and high schools last year to make up for an almost $10 million deficit. 

The initial proposals from the union and district have some major differences when it comes to salaries and health insurance contributions. The district is budgeted for a 2.5% increase to salaries for the first year of the contract. The proposal also includes a 1.5% increase in the second year in addition to a 1% retirement plan match. Both of those increases also include step and lane movement. The union is asking for 10% each year.

The district is also flat funding health insurance contributions for the next two years. Meanwhile, JEA is asking for the district to cover 85% of annual premiums. Right now, educators have a few options for health insurance plans, including an employer-compensated option that is free. 

Superintendent Frank Hauser wrote in an email that state funding controls how much the district can offer in salaries and benefits. He said the district estimates JEA’s proposal will cost $30 million over two years versus the district’s $2.2 million proposal.

Hauser declined to discuss the terms of contracts outside of the bargaining process, citing negotiation rules signed by both parties.

“We value our teachers and the vital role they — and all staff — play in student success, and we remain committed to working through the formal negotiation process to reach a fiscally responsible and sustainable agreement,” Hauser wrote.

Now the negotiations have passed the two month mark. JEA president Chris Heidemann said in an interview with KTOO they haven’t made progress with the district, despite counteroffers from both sides. He said the district refuses to negotiate individual financial elements within the contract proposals.

“We’re ready to bargain,” he said. “They’re just not working with us.”

Heidemann said there’s a lot of distrust between the union and the district because of a drawn out negotiation cycle for the current contract. 

They reached an impasse during the last negotiation cycle that escalated to teachers working only during the hours they were paid for. 

Heidemann said if negotiations don’t progress, he fears teachers may go into the next school year without raises.

“There’s a lot of pessimism about that,” he said. “And I think there’s just a lack of trust between teachers and the district administration right now.”

Heidemann added that a combination of flat funding from the state and poor budget management from the district resulted in a concerning contract proposal.

“They chose to attack our health plan, and if we take $0 in additional health care contributions, that means that everybody who gets insurance through us next year will take home less pay,” Heidemann said.

Contract negotiations depend on how much money the district has. Its budget for next year relies on a $400 increase in per-student funding. But that’s not guaranteed after Dunleavy’s veto.

While there are several bills that would increase district funding, Heidemann is concerned that another year without additional state money could lead to another year of staffing cuts the district can’t handle.

“We’re down to the point now where if we keep having to cut, we’re just not going to be able to keep the building safe,” he said. “We are at the bare minimum personnel to keep kids in the buildings going to school.”

The district is also in negotiations with unions for support staff and administrators.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional comment from Superintendent Frank Hauser and to correct language around the district’s initial salary and health insurance proposal. 

The Alaska Senate is planning to vote Monday on a new education funding bill, even as Gov. Dunleavy is calling for changes. That’s after a state Senate committee approved a new version of a bill calling on school districts to regulate student cellphone use.

The new version of House Bill 57 from the Senate Finance Committee includes a $700 boost to the base student allocation, the basic input into the state’s public school funding formula. It also includes a 10% boost to student transportation funding, a longtime priority for school districts facing rising costs.

School leaders, community members and others have said for years the state’s schools are underfunded, and school boards have been forced to slash staff and programs as lawmakers and the governor have struggled to come to terms on a long-term boost to education funding.

The revised bill comes a week after Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a prior bill adding $1,000 to the base student allocation and two days after an override vote failed. Dunleavy has said for years he’d veto any school funding bills that don’t include his preferred policy priorities and twice made good on that threat.

Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, who caucuses with the largely Democratic bipartisan Senate majority, says the new bill is an attempt to compromise.

“We talked about some of the policies that were in play, and there’s quite a few of them, which ones seemed to be most universally acceptable, and threw them together,” Stedman said of the new bill.

Some of the policy items included in the bill would ease the process of creating and renewing charter schools.

Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said the bill “strikes a balance between having public policies that have been well-vetted and that will actually improve education outcomes in our public schools, and also provid(es) the desperately needed resources to stabilize our public school system and keep our class sizes limited.”

There are, however, some significant differences between lawmakers’ approach and a bill Dunleavy introduced after vetoing lawmakers’ last attempt.

The Senate version of the bill does not, for instance, limit the reasons school districts can terminate charter schools’ contracts, nor does it prescribe a new appeal process for charter schools that face termination. Those, along with a provision that would create a statewide open enrollment system that allows students living in one district to go to school in another, have faced opposition from Senate leadership.

The new bill also omits a funding increase for correspondence homeschool and $450-per-student incentive payments to school districts whose elementary-age kids read at grade level.

In a social media post Thursday, Gov. Dunleavy called on lawmakers to add those items.

“Let me be clear. If legislators make a few key edits, including restoring the reading grants, adding open enrollment, ensuring full funding for correspondence students, and including the four charter school reforms, I will sign this bill,” he said.

The bill is scheduled for amendments on the Senate floor on Friday.

If Dunleavy ultimately vetoes the bill, the predominantly Democratic coalitions who control the House and Senate could not override him without help from minority Republicans.

Rep. Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks, who objected to the prior bill’s large price tag, said the new bill looks more affordable.

“It doesn’t appear to me to be the kind of the clear things that the executive (Dunleavy) is asking for, but it’s certainly closer,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll get there. It doesn’t feel like we’re that far apart here in the building.”

Stapp said he’d like to see the governor’s open enrollment and correspondence school provisions added to the bill.

Rep. Jeremy Bynum, R-Ketchikan, one of three Republicans who crossed over to support an earlier compromise education funding package, declined to discuss the new bill in detail.

“We’ll just have to see what the final bill ends up looking like,” he said.

The bill is expected to move quickly through the Senate and onto the House. Because the bill already passed the House — though at that point, it only included a requirement that schools regulate cellphone use — approval in the Senate would set up a single up-or-down vote in the House on concurring with the upper chamber’s changes.

A lot has changed at the University of Alaska since President Trump’s inauguration. After executive orders, the University of Alaska Board of Regents directed its university leadership to remove mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion to protect its federal funding. But the Trump administration still froze or canceled millions of dollars in federal funding.

At the University of Alaska Southeast, Chancellor Aparna Palmer said she’s trying to balance upholding the university’s values with maintaining federal funding. Two of the campus’ grants have been affected, but it has been able to restore or find other sources of funding for them.

Palmer said she’s focused on federal financial aid, which hasn’t been touched yet.

“My priority is to make sure that we do what it takes to preserve that federal student aid for our students. That would be a huge, huge percentage of students who would be affected,” she said.

She said about 40 to 50% of UAS students receive federal student aid. Palmer said students should continue applying for aid. 

On top of funding, UAS is keeping an eye on its international students’ immigration status. Elsewhere in the state, four University of Alaska Anchorage students have had their visas revoked.

But Palmer said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers haven’t been on any UAS campuses.

“So far, none of their visas are being revoked, but we monitor the situation daily,” Palmer said.

She said anyone who sees immigration enforcement officers on campus should report it immediately to the university so they can support and advocate for students.

Alaska lawmakers on Tuesday failed to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a bill that would have provided a $1,000 boost to basic per-student funding for public schools.

The combined House and Senate vote was 33-27, well short of the 40 votes needed to override Dunleavy’s veto. All but two members of the House and Senate’s Democrat-heavy bipartisan majority caucuses voted for the bill; all 25 members of the all-Republican minorities voted to sustain the veto.

Dunleavy vetoed the bill on Thursday, saying it didn’t include his preferred policy changes and that the bill’s $250 million price tag was too steep.

On that second point, chief Senate budgeter Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, said he reluctantly agreed, voting against an override. Hoffman acknowledged the need to boost funding for the state’s schools. Superintendents, parents, principals and business leaders have said for years that inadequate state funding has forced them to increase class sizes, slash beloved programs like sports and electives, and lay off staff.

But Hoffman said the state can’t afford a $1,000 increase right now given the worsening fiscal picture, driven in part by low oil prices.

“We need to take our heads out of the sand, look at the fiscal realities that we live in today and do what the people have sent us down here to do, to balance this budget,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman repeated a call for lawmakers to pass a series of revenue measures that he said would allow the state to fund schools appropriately. The largely Democratic Senate majority has backed three bills that would roll back oil and gas tax credits and expand corporate income taxes.

The head budgeter in the House, Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, took issue with Hoffman’s view.

“I can’t go to my constituents and say this is just unaffordable, because it’s not. It’s just a question of will, that’s all,” he said.

Josephson said the $1,000 boost would cost just $77 million more than the state approved for public schools last year on a one-time basis. That’s a small fraction of the nearly $3 billion that the state has in savings.

Status quo spending would leave the state hundreds of millions of dollars in deficit, and it’s unclear how lawmakers will resolve the shortfall. The state Constitution requires lawmakers to pass a balanced budget every year.

Senate Finance Committee co-chair Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, said before voting against the override that drawing from the state’s primary rainy-day fund, the Constitutional Budget Reserve, was not prudent with oil prices and financial markets in turmoil.

Stedman said he didn’t want to risk being forced to reduce school funding next year.

“The headwinds coming at the state over the next year or so look significant, more significant than they have ever looked in my 20 years here,” he said. “We are very concerned over the next year that we may have demands on our treasury that we have not foreseen.”

The top three sources of state revenue are investment earnings, oil taxes and the federal government, all of which are under pressure.

Stedman said lawmakers should focus on passing a minimum $680 boost in long-term funding, matching the one-time funding schools got last year. He said lawmakers should consider an additional “incremental” boost next year.

Minority Republicans were largely silent on the floor but echoed Stedman’s budget concerns in a news conference after the vote.

The veto — and the failed override — were expected. The Senate Finance Committee stripped out policy measures aimed at finding common ground with Dunleavy and avoiding a repeat of last year’s veto. The governor took to social media to call the new funding-only bill a “joke” and pledged to veto it. It passed with a one-vote majority in each chamber, and Dunleavy made good on his veto threat days later.

Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, said Tuesday that senators thought at the time that the bill had a realistic chance of passing despite a veto from the governor.

“Before Gov. Dunleavy came out and called it a joke, we thought there were 40 votes there,” Wielechowski said, though it’s not clear where those votes would have come from.

Dunleavy applauded the failed override on social media Tuesday.

Lawmakers say they’ll keep trying

Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposed a $560 boost to basic education funding, the base student allocation, in a bill he announced alongside his veto. The bill also includes additional funding aimed at boosting correspondence homeschool and an incentive program that would reward school districts with large numbers of young students who read at grade level or demonstrate improvement.

Dunleavy’s bill also includes provisions that would change the appeal process for charter schools terminated by a local school board and an open enrollment policy that would allow parents to enroll their students in brick-and-mortar schools outside their home district.

Those provisions are already causing some heartburn from Senate leadership. Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said he worried they would take power from locally elected school boards.

“There are some things that we’re very concerned about,” he said, adding that he hoped to continue discussions aimed at finding common ground. He said he had not yet discussed Dunleavy’s new bill with the governor.

Lawmakers on all sides said they hoped to come to a compromise in the month left in the legislative session.

“It does feel like the wind has come out of the sails a little bit after this, after this override session, but we’ve still got time,” Wielechowski said. “Our schools are counting on us.”

Rep. Mia Costello, R-Anchorage and the House minority leader, said she looked forward to digging into the governor’s proposal to find a way forward.

“We just have to work through the process and I think work together in the last weeks of session in order to get the governor’s bill across the finish line,” she said.

Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, the primary sponsor of the bill Dunleavy vetoed, said she thought the veto and failed override were “somewhat predictable, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.”

“I know that right now in every school district, personnel are being laid off, programs are being cut, families are asking themselves, ‘Is this what I signed up for when I decided I was going to raise my kids here in this state?'” she said. “So we have some work to do.”

Juneau School District Board of Education member Will Muldoon stepped down from his position on Monday.

According to a press release from the district, Muldoon submitted his resignation effective immediately and gave no reason for his departure. 

“The district and board appreciate Mr. Muldoon’s service to the community of Juneau, and the time and effort he has devoted to the district’s students and employees,” the district’s statement reads. 

Muldoon won his seat in 2021 as the first write-in candidate elected to the school board in decades. He was re-elected to another three-year term last year.

Muldoon did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The board has 30 days to fill Muldoon’s position. The board will choose from a pool of applicants at an upcoming meeting where members of the public will have an opportunity to comment. The date of that meeting has not yet been set. 

The newly appointed member will serve until this year’s municipal election in October, when voters will elect a member to serve the remainder of the term.

Applicants for the position must be qualified to vote in Juneau and cannot be a district employee.

Legislation passed Wednesday by the Alaska House of Representatives would require the state’s school districts to adopt policies that restrict the use of cellphones by students during school hours.

House Bill 57, which will advance to the Senate after a 34-6 vote, does not require districts to ban students’ cellphones altogether but does require them to regulate students’ use of phones during regular school hours, including during lunch and the time between classes.

An earlier version of the bill would have required the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development to draft a model policy as an example for districts to follow, but that requirement was eliminated in a floor amendment.

The amendment also eliminated a requirement that school districts report their academic performance before and after the new cellphone policy.

Cellphones would be allowed for translation purposes, in emergencies, for medical reasons, and as needed for instruction.

Restrictions on cellphones in the classroom are growing in popularity across the country, and eight states — including Florida, California, Virginia and Indiana — have banned them altogether.

Every state except Nevada and Wyoming has proposed or is considering a statewide ban or restriction, according to a tally kept by the Associated Press. Some members of Congress are considering national legislation.

The bans come amid a broadening base of research that shows smartphone and social media use can contribute to negative mental health and poor academic achievement among students in grade school and high school.

Several lawmakers, including Gov. Mike Dunleavy, proposed legislation this year that would restrict cellphone use in schools.

HB 57, from Rep. Zack Fields, D-Anchorage, became the leading bill.

On April 11, Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna, proposed an amendment that rewrote the bill’s language to reflect a section of an education bill approved by the Senate Education Committee.

Ruffridge said he thinks Alaskans believe in local control of education.

“The language of Amendment No. 2 gives that ability to govern yourselves and be as strict or as permissive as possible at the district level,” he said.

Fields spoke against the amendment, saying it turned HB 57 from a cellphone ban into “a cellphone discouragement policy.”

The amendment passed on a 19-18 vote.

Five days later, when the bill came up for a final vote, Fields voted for it.

“The amendment adopted to this bill substantially weakens it,” Fields said. “I’m still going to vote for the bill and send it to the next body because I think there’s an opportunity to resurrect better language.”

Other legislators also stood up in support, offering anecdotal stories about the way cellphones have affected their children and children they know.

“Parents and our state are at war against these screens,” said Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, speaking in favor of the bill.

A handful of legislators spoke against the bill, including Ruffridge, whose amendment significantly rewrote it.

Ruffridge said he supports giving local school districts the authority to make decisions like this.

“It’s not up to us to do,” he said.

Rep. David Nelson, R-Anchorage, said that there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about kids’ mental health, but that is a wider issue than just cellphones.

“If we’re going to be trusting young people and saying, ‘Hey, you are the future,’ why are we banning communication devices in public schools?” he said.

HB 57 is subject to a reconsideration vote on the House floor before it advances to the Senate, but legislators said they don’t expect the tally to change much, if at all.

The bill has been tentatively scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday.