The Anchorage School District budget shortfall must be viewed as a hostile attack on public schools from the state by limiting local control of school district budgets.The clear solution is for the Alaska Legislature to remove the maximum limit of spending on school districts, but until then the Anchorage Assembly should use its budgetary power to utilize an existing loophole in the state law to make contributions to ASD.
There is a limited definition of what constitutes an in-kind contribution to school districts that count toward the max limit. The only items listed that count include insurance, utilities, energy, audits and maintenance of facilities.
Currently, this exploit is used to pay for the police officers stationed in Anchorage schools under the School Resource Officer program, at a cost of several million dollars annually, and has been done this way for over a decade.
Instead of bloating the police budget, the Assembly could choose this year to build into their budget the cost of, say, servicing ASD vehicles through the muni garages instead of charging the district for this service as usual. I’m sure there are other ways that this exploit could be used to save ASD from contributing toward their maximum spending cap.
This isn’t a conventional way to approach the solution. However, I have little faith that the state Legislature will resolve this issue, and all approaches should be considered that are within local control.
— Hans Thompson
Anchorage
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