State education officials say an annual ranking of projects that is used by state budgeters to determine which public schools get renovated may be prejudiced against small, rural school districts, including ones that are attended predominantly by Alaska Native students.
Each year, the Alaska education department approves a list of maintenance and construction projects that are ranked by a committee, in an effort to limit political interference in the funding process. The ranking process has grown in importance as lawmakers have appropriated less and less money to school capital projects each year, meaning only those at the top of the maintenance list get funded.
But education department officials say that the list-ranking process provides priority to school districts that have the funding to pay for detailed surveys and planning experts, often leaving smaller school districts — which lack the funds for such detailed assessments — lower on the ranking.
“The system isn’t working,” Education Commissioner Deena Bishop told lawmakers earlier this month. “When you have a district that doesn’t have cash flow, who can’t get the assessments, they’re going to struggle forever.”
This year’s ranked maintenance list includes 103 projects, totaling $401 million in requested state funding. A separate list calls for an additional $442 million in state funding for 14 school construction projects.
Lawmakers in recent years have allocated enough funding to cover only a few projects.
Alaska should be spending over $376 million annually to maintain its public school facilities, according to an annual report prepared by the state education department, which calls for spending 3% of the school facilities’ assessed value each year on renovations.
School facilities in Alaska were valued at roughly $12.5 billion last year.
The current year’s budget includes less than $29 million for capital renewal of school facilities across Alaska.
Alaska last met the 3% benchmark in 2014.
In a series of hearings, lawmakers in the Senate Finance Committee said they are particularly concerned about this year’s maintenance list because the second-place project in the ranking — the renovation of a Galena school that serves roughly 100 children — has been approved for $34 million in state funding, more than the other top 14 projects on the list combined.
That project is “drowning out” other school districts with urgent needs, said Sen. Lyman Hoffman, a Bethel Democrat.
“There’s a lot of concerns that we have smaller schools that have health and safety issues that aren’t going to get addressed,” said Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican.
Hoffman and Stedman, who co-chair the Finance Committee, said they may choose not to fund the Galena project in order to afford a greater number of smaller projects, like septic system upgrades and boiler replacements.
Smaller and more rural school districts often submit projects that languish on the major maintenance ranking for years, slowly climbing up the list, before finally receiving state funding.
Department officials said that the Kuspuk School District, for example, had repeatedly requested funding to replace the roof of a school in Sleetmute. The project was initially submitted in 2007, at an estimated cost of less than $1.5 million. It wasn’t funded until 2025. By the time the funding was awarded, “additional damage had occurred and a roof would not solve all the problems with the facility,” said Heather Heineken, the department of education’s finance director. Now, the district is asking to replace the school entirely, at a cost of $35 million.
Meanwhile, the Galena City School District, which operates the state’s largest homeschooling program and as such receives tens of millions more annually from the state, “completed a comprehensive condition survey consisting of more than 400 pages,” said Heineken, noting that the cost of a comprehensive application for funding can be between $200,000 and $300,000.
That comprehensive survey helped the Galena school land near the top of the list in the first year it submitted its project.
Galena City School District Superintendent Jason Johnson said recently that Galena’s Sidney C. Huntington Elementary and High Schools Renovation project “entails addressing an extensive array of significant safety issues as outlined within the application in order to address hazards of a facility in which many areas were constructed nearly 50 years ago.”
Hoffman and Stedman asked Bishop earlier this month to submit a reworked ranking of maintenance projects for the consideration of the committee, which is set to assemble a capital budget to fund facility maintenance and construction projects.
“I do think you have some ability to push back if you think the criteria is imbalanced relative to particular school districts,” Stedman told Bishop.
In response to their request, education department Facilities Manager Michael Butikofer submitted a memo proposing future changes to the ranking process to allow small and rural school districts to compete with larger ones.
That includes using a “funding equalizer” that would award more points to “districts that do not have the financial resources available to advance projects to more developed stages of design prior to receiving state funding.”