April 8, 2014

Dear Neighbors,

Yesterday, I and like-minded colleagues in the Alaska Legislature worked late into the night to protect our children’s future by offering fixes to House Bill 278, the major legislation of the year pertaining to our public education system.

House Bill 278 was dramatically changed as various bills were rolled into it without adequate study or public comment when it moved through the House Education and Finance Committees. Resources are still not enough and schools face a fourth straight year of teacher cuts, increased class sizes and cancelled programs.

The following summarizes some of the major fixes my colleagues and I offered on the house floor so you will have a good idea of what problems we were able to correct and which ones will require our continued attention and effort.

Successful amendments made to House Bill 278

• Stripping out provisions which would have stretched out payments to the teachers’ retirement fund for decades rather than paying them off sooner. This would have ultimately led to billions in additional future costs and negatively impacted our credit rating.

• Restoring a mechanism to compensate for higher costs in rural Alaska and providing for a one-time grant to schools of $30 million.

• Allowing highly skilled students to test out of certain subjects, saving schools money and students’ time and effort.

Amendments to House Bill 278 that failed

• Removing a provision giving tax breaks to private religious schools and which likely violates constitutional provisions against state funding of private schools.

• Deleting a section that would have the state set pay rates for rural school employees, essentially taking away local control from school districts.

• Providing a 10 percent boost to charter schools to help them with rent and other facility expenses. Charter schools, unlike public schools, must pay for these additional costs.

• Fixing a prohibition on the Department of Education adopting federal “common core” educational standards. State standards already reflect portions of the common core and we don’t want to prevent them from being implemented if they are good policy.

• Removing a section that would hold teachers in rural Alaska to lower tenure standards than in urban areas.

• Increasing education funding to a level that would allow schools to reverse the previous three years of teacher layoffs and increased class sizes.

I am very glad to have fixed parts of House Bill 278, but I voted against the overall bill because, as written, it is still inconsistent with this being the “education session.” The bill forces cumbersome burdens that don’t help and doesn’t provide what we know will help.

At the very least we must reverse the previous three years of stagnant education funding which have led to teacher layoffs, increased class sizes and the loss of valuable programs such as shop class and summer school.

I am often told that properly funding education is unsustainable in current times of budget deficits, but I see it as a matter of prioritizing spending and making wise investments in our state’s future by ensuring we have children who grow up ready to join the workforce and contribute to building Alaska.

We can do this by getting our priorities straight. We should look for better investments than spending millions making improvements to a luxury office building that we don’t even own, or risking hundreds of millions of dollars backing a private toll bridge that does not pencil out financially, or giving away billions of dollars in state oil revenue in exchange for drastically declining amounts of oil in the pipeline. We need to remember that we have been entrusted with the stewardship of our state’s future and base our priorities accordingly.

Working Hard for Fairbanks Families,

Scott Kawasaki
Alaska State Representative
District 4 - Fairbanks