Anchorage's school funding gap has shrunk to about $6 million

Anchorage's school funding gap for next year has come down by about half, to roughly $6 million from the $12 million the municipality was contemplating at the start of this year.

The reason is a cap. The Legislature limited how much the municipality's allowable contribution can grow to 4 percent, budget director Ona Brause told the Assembly on Friday, which narrows the distance between what the district says it needs and what the municipal tax cap permits. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance's budget memo characterizes it somewhat differently, describing the legislative action as capping the required local contribution at the state level after a special levy narrowly failed at the polls.

The district's required local contribution for 2027 is about $138 million, an increase of $5.3 million.

What hasn't changed is the structural mismatch underneath. The school district budgets July through June. The municipality budgets by calendar year and has to tax and spend within the same year. So every annual property tax levy ends up covering halves of two different school budgets.

Asked whether the Assembly is effectively choosing between school funding and city services, Brause said that possibility exists every year — the open questions are how much and when.

Assembly Chair Anna Brawley cautioned against treating November's budget as the final word. Describing a figure as settled then "is not a real number," she said, because the parameters still aren't known. She pointed to an ordinance the Assembly passed in April as one workaround: it pre-approved a school funding amount contingent on the Legislature acting by a set date on the base student allocation, the per-pupil figure that drives state school funding.

The mayor's full budget goes to the clerk Oct. 2 and is introduced Oct. 6, with Assembly deliberation running through November. Revisions come February through April, when mill rates are set.