Updated: 38 minutes ago Published: 57 minutes ago
The Anchorage School District is confronting critical needs for deferred maintenance and an operating budget shortfall, which result from malicious campaigns against school bonds and years of educational vetoes. In my own district, parents and neighbors are fighting to replace a beloved, high-performing and diverse neighborhood school that is likely to close soon if its decrepit building is not replaced. I write with a simple message: Our schools are worth fighting for, and if we fight hard enough, we will rebuild Alaska’s once-great system of public education.
Even before oil production opened a new spigot of revenue, Alaska was known for our outstanding education system. Statehood leaders and early Legislatures put in place a model system of public education and public employment. These leaders enshrined public and higher education in our constitution, established a world-class system of civil service with the Public Employees Relations Act, and funded good wages with strong benefits to recruit and retain teachers.
As a result, by the 1970s, Alaska was the best place in America to teach. Unfortunately, budgetary volatility in the 1980s and 1990s destabilized education funding, and elimination of teachers’ retirement in the early 2000s led to chronic turnover and teacher shortages. Since the oil price collapse of 2008, our schools have struggled to survive years of flat funding and direct cuts. These attacks have included school bond debt reimbursement vetoes in 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2021, as well as a 62% veto of school major maintenance appropriations this year.
Our democracy is predicated on a simple concept: The inalienable value of each human life, and equal opportunity for every child to reach their full potential. Public schools are the cornerstone of any public policy framework to secure that promise.
Although we often take public education for granted, it is neither inevitable nor universal. We established universal public education right here in the U.S. little more than a century ago. At that time, reactionaries opposed public education on a number of fronts, ranging from opposition to women’s literacy to concerns that public education would undermine a Jim Crow system of apartheid. Narrow-minded opponents of public education didn’t want to take children out of the mines, the cotton fields, and the factories where kids were providing nearly-free labor. The last century has proven the absurdity of economic objections to education. Far from undermining economic competitiveness, public education and higher education propelled the U.S. to a position of being the most powerful nation on earth just in time to save the world from fascism. And high-quality public education has proven to be the bedrock of equal opportunity for kids from all economic backgrounds.
The Anchorage School District will soon release school closure proposals, and will also be forced to consider increases to class sizes, elimination of sports, music and immersion programs — but only if the Legislature doesn’t increase educational operating funding next year.
We must not accept an ever-shrinking pie of education funding. Closing high-performing schools, eliminating language immersion, sports, and music would only accelerate the outmigration of working-age Alaskans, damage our economy and, ironically, make school closures a self-fulfilling prophesy. When the list of potential school closures come out, let’s not allow neighborhoods or programs to be pitted against each other, but work together for adequate state funding to prevent closures and other cuts.
If you want to maintain small enough class sizes for kids to learn, keep your neighborhood school open, if you think that sports, language immersion, IGNITE and related programs are an important part of supporting families and growing our economy, then you can make a difference: Vote for pro-education candidates who are committed to raising Base Student Allocation (BSA) funding for school operations and who will fund state matching dollars for maintenance of school buildings.
For the last four years, Alaska and Anchorage have lost population as vetoes have damaged our school system. A prosperous future and economic growth depend on strong public education. Please be engaged now, at this critical time in politics, to defend and rebuild our schools.
Rep. Zack Fields is a member of the bipartisan House majority caucus and co-chairs the Labor and Commerce Committee.
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