The Alaska Policy Forum has published a report showing that for every four teachers in Alaska, there are five other staff members performing various other duties. Districts across the state average three teachers for every four other staff members.
The school districts with the highest number of teachers as a ratio to other staff include the Mat-Su Borough School District, which has about a 1:1 teacher-staff ratio. Teachers represent 49% of all district staff in the valley. Anchorage also was about 1:1.
The Tanana City School District has the lowest ratio of teachers to other staff, .35:1. For every teacher — and there are four of them — the district employees nearly three other staff members. The student-teacher ratio in Tanana is 8:1.
In only seven of Alaska’s 53 school districts do teachers represent 50% or more of the district’s staff: Alaska Gateway (69%), Aleutian Region (62%), Craig City (51%), Kenai Peninsula Borough (52%), Nome Public Schools (55%), Sitka (54%), and Yakutat (50%), the Alaska Policy Forum says.
By “other staff” the organization means administrators, principals, guidance counselors, librarians, instructional aides, and more. Alaska currently has about 129,000 students enrolled and over 7,200 teachers (full time equivalents), with a pupil-teacher ratio of about 18:1.
The report comes at a time when nationally, the employment in the nation’s schools has reached an all-time high, even as school enrollment lags in nearly every state.
On a per-student basis, schools employ more teachers and other staff than they’ve ever had.
For example, in 2018-19, the last full year before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Virginia public schools employed just under 87,000 teachers. By 2020-21, the schools had employed about 75 more staff, about 0.1%, while school enrollment had declined by 2.9%. By 2022, Virginia schools had added even more staff, as student enrollment continued to dwindle, according to Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.
Aldeman writes in The 74, an education blog, that school staffing is hitting an all-time high and at least 48 states and the District of Columbia were reviewed, and three-quarters had added staff the first full year of the pandemic, while only two states, North Dakota and South Dakota, and D.C. enrolled more students.
“As a result, schools in 46 out of 49 states effectively lowered their teacher-student ratios during the height of the pandemic,” Aldeman reports. The national student-teacher ratio is about 17:1.
