David Boyle: Calling BS on BSA and the fiction that flat funding and inflation caused Alaska schools to fail

By DAVID BOYLE

The Alaska Legislature is again wrestling with increasing the funding of our K-12 education system. The mantra of “flat funding for decades” has been replaced by “inflation is causing the system to fail.”

The supporters of more funding — with no accountability for results — focus on a single funding factor, the Base Student Allocation, or BSA. They ignore the additional revenue streams that also fund our education system.

This misleads the Legislature and the public. In truth, the Legislative Finance Division says that funding for K-12 has increased by 34% since 2006.

Here are the funding streams that pay for our K12 system:

The FY24 State aid to school districts consisted of $1,151,132,737 (based on the Base Student Allocation funding formula). Pupil transportation for FY24 was nearly $71 million, which is in addition to the BSA formula. Note that for FY25 an additional $7.3 million was provided outside the transportation funding formula for a declining number of students.

In FY24 the federal government provided $88,768,627 in impact aid. This funding comes from nontaxable federal properties as an offset to local tax dollars.

In FY24 the Alaska Legislature provided one-time funding of $87,554,016 outside the BSA formula. Another added revenue stream comes from “minimum required local effort” which requires organized boroughs to kick in a “fair share” to pay for the local schools. For FY24 this totaled $300,641,017 from schools in organized boroughs and municipalities.

The E-Rate funding comes from federal funds that every cell and landline user pays for. This used to be called the Universal Services Fund. In FY23 the state received more than $100 Million in E-Rate funds. These funds go to most of the rural schools to pay for the internet and communications. Here is a listing of the schools that received these funds:

The Quality Schools Initiative provides an additional $16 per student count. In FY24 this totaled $4.1 million. The state received more than $257 million from the various federal title programs in FY23.

Here is a Department of Education graph showing total State aid and one-time funding through time:

During the Covid “pandemic,” the State of Alaska received an additional $579,826,453 in federal funding through various legislation. Some of this funding was limited in its use. The question is, “What did all this money do to improve student achievement?”

To its credit, the Department of Education has provided transparency in the allocation and use of these Covid funds (link may not work in Safari browser, but works in Chrome): https://app.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=0cfd777df5b94c0bbec2 7cc0631318a4

The education industry sees the writing on the wall: The number of students is seriously declining and because the state’s funding is based on that number it wants to inflate the funding to the maximum. State aid is projected to decrease another $36 million due to the decrease in student enrollment.

Since 2014 the number of brick-and-mortar students has decreased by 11,573. And the number of correspondence students during that same period has gone from 11,114 to 22,293.

This is an astounding increase of 11,179 students. Here is a graph from DEED showing the data from FY2000 through a projected student count for FY2026:

We need accountability for results rather than throwing money at the problem. Incentivizing current bad behavior will only result in the education industry returning to the legislature and asking for even more funding.

I say the Legislature needs to ensure the funds go to the classroom.

But what do you think? Are we spending enough? Or do we need to spend more without accountability for results?

You can provide your testimony on HB 69 by writing to [email protected]

David Boyle is the education writer at Must Read Alaska.