Association of Alaska School Boards

Legislative Bulletin

A weekly digest of activity by the Alaska Legislature and U.S. Congress for Alaska’s School Board Members. AASB Tel. 907-586-1083, Fax 907-586-2995. Executive Director, Carl Rose, crose@aasb.org; Editor, John Greely, Review past issues of the Bulletin on the AASB website at http://www.aasb.org. To unsubscribe send an email requesting the same to jgreely@aasb.org

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June 15, 2007

FUNDING TASK FORCE DISCUSSES EDUCATION FORMULA

The inaugural meetings of the Legislative Education Funding Task Force focused on a handful of issues, including the Base Student Allocation, the required local funding effort, regional cost differentials, and intensive needs. The 11-member group met Thursday and Friday at the Anchorage Legislative Information Office to get a briefing on K-12 school funding from Eddy Jeans, director of School Finance at the Department of Education & Early Development. A second set of meetings is scheduled for July 11 and 12, also in Anchorage.

“I see a lot of agreement around the table to use 50 percent of ISER as a starting point” to update the District Cost Factor in the formula, commented Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, the co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a member of the task force. He spoke after a wide-ranging discussion Friday of the merits of a 2005 report by the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) recommending new and higher cost factors.

Other task force members questioned whether the ISER report should be used as the basis for anything other than a temporary increase in the cost factors. Sen. Gary Wilken, R-Fairbanks, a long-time critic of the study, said it should be replaced with a new survey of school costs.

The task force was created when the 2007 Legislature failed to agree on a series of reforms to the funding formula in May. The House and Senate opted instead to implement a one-year increase in the District Cost Factor costing about $48 million, and coupled that with $21 million in School Improvement Grants distributed on a per-student basis outside the formula.

Deliberations of the task force on Thursday focused on the history of school funding in Alaska and delved into specifics such as intensive needs students. For a news summary of Thursday’s task force meeting, click here:

http://newsminer.com/2007/06/15/7498

The task force has set a deadline of September 1 to complete its review of the school funding formula. Its recommendations could form the basis for a compromise bill in the 2008 session.

The task force has established a website, with links to background materials and an audio stream of its meetings. Here is that link:

http://housemajority.org/coms/index.php?c=77