Senate President Gary Stevens of Kodiak said last week that years of “flat funding and high inflation has pushed our public education system into crisis.”
A leader in the group of legislators advocating for vast amounts of new formula funding to pay teachers at Alaska public schools, Stevens was responding to Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s education funding and reform package, which was released last week along with House Bill 76 and Senate Bill 82.
“Currently, teachers have many classrooms above 40 students which decreases their individual impact on students, schools are closing because of financial distress, and families are leaving this state because of the lack of opportunities and stability,” Stevens said.
Read Sen. Stevens’ statement here.
Schools are closing because people are not having kids in many communities, such as Anchorage and Juneau, and there isn’t a need for so many schools anymore.
According to the Alaska Department of Labor, the outmigration in Alaska is actually lower in 2023 than the 10-year and 20-year averages. People are leaving at a lower rate, but the outmigration trend is not being matched by new arrivals, something that is not due to education, but lack of economic opportunity.
Forty students per teacher is a provably false, and Stevens, as a life-long educator, knows it. There are few, if any schools in Alaska with classes that have 40 or more students in them.
Data suggests that the average class size in Alaska’s high schools is around 18-20 students. The only classes in Alaska that might have more than 40 students may be Anchorage physical education, band, student government, or choir classes.
Anecdotally, there was a robotics teacher in Anchorage who needed more students so put out the call to get more, and more than 40 signed up. That is the number that the Anchorage Teachers Association (NEA) is using when they are bargaining for more money.
The House and Senate have agreed to a working group negotiation with the governor to see if there is a place they can agree on when it comes to education funding and accountability.
Here are the actual teacher-student ratios from around Alaska, with Anchorage averaging higher due to having correspondence and homeschool programs, where one teacher is assigned to many non-campus students who are learning at home.
