By DAVID BOYLE
Last year the Anchorage School District asked voters to approve a $111 million bond which included rebuilding Inlet View school.
Voters said no to the bond by a 51-to-49 vote margin.
This year’s school Proposition No. 1, for $37.8 million, is mainly for improvements to nine elementary schools. But the district already has extra money in its undesignated fund balance to pay for the costs of those schools, and more.
You read that right: ASD is asking the voters for more money when it already has at least $46.16 million in its undesignated fund balance above the 8% required minimum.
This past fall the district was going to close six elementary schools because of a dwindling student population and a projected loss of another 5,000 students by 2027.
One must ask, “Why are we asking voters to approve construction projects at nine elementary schools when these same schools may be closed in the very near future?”
After its failed effort to rebuild the Inlet View Elementary School last year, the district is trying a different tactic to rebuild the school. It realizes that last year’s bond failure may have been due to putting the rebuilding of the that school on the ballot.
It has left this rebuild off this year’s bond issue.
The district learned from the failure of last year’s bond that the voters did not want to rebuild the Inlet View school due to the current excess school capacity and decreasing student population.
Apparently, the new strategy is to rebuild the Inlet View school after this bond is approved because the district has more than $37 million remaining in its School Bond Debt Reimbursement bucket. Just enough to rebuild Inlet View.
The district is defying the voters’ defeat of this bond last year.
ASD is also asking Anchorage property taxpayers for an additional $6.8 million, a 2.65% increase. The total property taxes would be more than $263 million.
The Anchorage School District continues to increase the burden on property taxpayers and renters while remodeling schools that may soon be closed.
And it is defying voters and bending to the Inlet View constituency in rebuilding that school even though the district has a surplus of elementary schools now and an even lower student population in the near future.
