House Bill 57, sponsored by Democrat Rep. Zack Fields, is intended to create policies and mandates to prohibit cell phone use I’m schools in Alaska.
But in Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, it became so much more — hundreds of millions of dollars more. The committee substitute for the bill stuffed in a $700 per student increase to education in the Base Student Allocation, which is the basis of the state’s contributions to local school districts.
But wait, there’s more: The committee also added in a 10% increase in transportation funding for schools.
The bill, when it was just about curbing student cell phone access in schools, passed the House on April 16 on a vote of 34-6.
The new version, howeve, is a fight with Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who earlier this week offered House Bill 204, which has education policy reforms and a beefy funding increase.
The Senate Democrat-led majority doesn’t appear to want the governor to have a win in education, so they’ve stuffed the funding they want, without Dunleavy’s policies relating to school choice and performance expectation, into a bill that originally had almost no fiscal impact, but was a Democrat policy bill relating to schools.
Notable is that the Senate Finance Committee had scheduled hearing the cell phone bill before it even left the House. The committee asked no questions of presenter Rep. Fields, and immediately brought forth the committee substitute.
But now, the Finance Committee doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to move it to the floor. In fact, the Democrat-led majority had two emergency caucus meetings on Wednesday, which indicates there’s trouble in the caucus.
Just days ago , the governor vetoed House Bill 69, the massive education funding bill from Democrats that would have added $1,000 per student increase to the school districts on a permanent annual basis. Dunleavy then offered a new bill that included a smaller Base Student Allocation increase and his policy proposals.
But in the Senate there seems to be two camps — one camp wants to get things done, and the other camp, led by senators like Sen. Bill Wielechowski, are taking a “burn it down” approach so they can have something to use in the 2026 election cycle to beat up Republicans.
Almost certainly, if HB 57 makes it to the governor’s desk in its current condition, Dunleavy will veto that bill, as he did HB 69.
Meanwhile, Dunleavy’s House Bill 204, with its $560 BSA increase and another $35 million for various programs, has yet to be even scheduled for a hearing. The legislative session ends on May 21, just 27 days away.
Watch what went down in Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday at this link.
Silly humans. Each person is given a brain that can process immense information, but if you put a bunch of politicians brains together with a sprinkling of money, all that potential is lost.
This behavior is reminiscent of spoiled children. The majority leadership isn’t willing to even schedule a hearing for a bill that has a small measure of accountability.
That the legislators at this level of the government have to mandate cell phone use in schools, means that the highly paid Supervisors, of the various Alaskan Boroughs, are not doing their collective jobs. They are not managing the students or the teachers.
School Districts could remove this layer of administration cost from the budget, and save a bundle.
Clearly the reason the cell phone clause in the legislative proposal was to ensure that placeholder legislation was available into which the radical changes can be inserted