Anchorage School Board spends $3 million on classrooms, deepening next year's deficit

The Anchorage School Board decided Tuesday to put $3 million in one-time state money into schools this year rather than hold it against next year's shortfall. The vote was 4-3.

The cost of that decision is on the same page. The projected gap for the 2028 budget year grew from about $6 million to more than $9 million, and the number of teaching positions the district expects to be able to preserve next year fell from roughly 144 to around 123. Twenty teaching jobs, in other words, moved from next year into this one.

"So we're digging a little bit of a bigger hole," Vice President Kelly Lessens said.

The money goes into a $3.7 million pot covering tutoring, credit recovery, services from the school-based health center, and staff, the kinds of positions schools fill with paraprofessionals, substitutes and counselors as much as with teachers. The board had spent the previous week weighing whether to bank it instead.

Board President Carl Jacobs voted against the amendment, saying he had no appetite for "increasing our deficit when we don't know what we're going to cut." He voted for the amended budget document anyway, which passed 5-2. Chief Financial Officer Andy Ratliff told the board he could not say where even $6 million in cuts would come from.

The members who voted to spend it had made their case earlier: that the deficit will be there regardless, that the district has struggled to convert money into actual teachers in a tight hiring market, and that students in classrooms now should not wait for a budget problem that arrives in 2028.

The board adopts that budget in February. The Assembly takes it up in March.