Author name: moderat ereport

by Emily Schwing, KYUK This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK Public Media and NPR’s Station Investigations Team. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. When Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon toured the public school in Sleetmute last fall, he called the building “the poster child” for what’s wrong with the way the state pays to build and maintain schools. The tiny community 240 miles west of Anchorage had begged Alaska’s education department for nearly two decades for money to repair a leaky roof that over time had left part of the school on the verge of collapse. Seated at a cafeteria table after the tour, Edgmon, a veteran independent lawmaker, told a Yup’ik elder he planned to “start raising a little bit of Cain” when he returned to the Capitol in Juneau for the 2025 legislative session. Other lawmakers said similar things after an investigation by KYUK Public Media, ProPublica and NPR earlier this year found that the state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings, including the Sleetmute school. Because of the funding failures, students and teachers in some of Alaska’s most remote villages face serious health and safety risks, the news organizations found. Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, an Anchorage Democrat, called the investigation’s findings “heartbreaking” and said in an email during the legislative session earlier this year that “the current state of these schools is unacceptable.” Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, wrote to say that the “responsibility lies squarely on the legislature” and acknowledged “we do not do enough.” Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican from Fairbanks, wrote, “We are working to right the ship!” Yet during a legislative session where money for education was front and center, lawmakers were only able to pass $40 million in school construction and maintenance funding, about 5% of the nearly $800 million that districts say they need to keep their buildings safe and operating. Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon visits Sleetmute students last fall. (Emily Schwing/KYUK) In June, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than two-thirds of that, nearly $28 million. “Basically, we don’t have enough money to pay for all of our obligations,” Dunleavy explained in a video posted on YouTube. In the video, seated at an empty table in a darkened room and flanked by U.S. and Alaska flags, Dunleavy, a Republican, painted a grim picture of the state’s future. “The price of oil has gone down; therefore our revenue is going down,” he said. The crisis Dunleavy described isn’t just a short-term problem. State officials have known for decades that relying on oil to fund the budget is risky as prices and production have declined. But year after year, they have failed to agree on a solution to finance school repairs and renovations. Alaska is one of only two states without an income tax or statewide sales tax. Average annual spending on education facilities declined by nearly 60% after 2014, the year oil prices plummeted, according to a 2021 report by the University of Alaska Anchorage. Overall spending on rural facilities is now less than half of what the National Council on School Facilities recommends. Sen. Löki Tobin, a Democrat from Anchorage who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said it’s hard to get “momentum” around various ideas to fund education, “let alone just getting folks to realize that we have been by attrition defunding our schools.” Education Front and Center Alaska’s Legislature seemed primed this year to address education funding. Several new candidates from both parties campaigned on education and won seats in November’s statewide election. “We flipped an entire statehouse,” said Tobin, who was elected to the Legislature in 2022, “based on the question of adequate school funding.” Lawmakers filed a bill to fund education before the session even began. And in the first months of the year, dozens of superintendents, students and school board members traveled to Juneau to testify before lawmakers and urge them to increase funding for curriculum, teacher salaries and other costs. During one Senate Finance Committee hearing, panel co-chair Lyman Hoffman, who has represented rural Alaskan school districts for 38 years, raised the specter of a civil rights lawsuit similar to those the state has faced in the past over education in primarily Indigenous communities. The prospect, he said, could be “more costly to the state than if we came forward and tried to do something about the condition of these schools.” Sleetmute’s roof has been leaking for so long that the wall has started to buckle under the weight of snow and ice, first image, and a bathroom ceiling is covered in mold. (Emily Schwing/KYUK) In April, Alaska’s House and Senate passed a bipartisan bill that would have offered the largest increase in nearly a decade in what the state spends on each student annually. It did not include capital funds for school construction or maintenance. Days later, Dunleavy, a former superintendent and school board member, vetoed it. He said it didn’t include enough support for homeschooling and charter schools — policy changes that he’s long pushed for. Before the legislative session adjourned in May, lawmakers passed a compromise bill that included less spending and eased regulations for charter schools. Dunleavy again vetoed it, but lawmakers overrode the veto. The next month, Dunleavy used his line-item veto power to slash 3% from the education budget, the largest cut to any department in the state. This year’s total state budget came to $14.7 billion, about $1 billion less than the previous year. Some lawmakers have described it as “bare bones” and “flat funded.” Among Dunleavy’s cuts was more than $25 million that was supposed to pay for school construction and maintenance. School districts have to apply to the state for those funds each year, and their proposed projects are then ranked. The reduction doesn’t leave enough money this year to pay for even the top three projects among the 84