The state is still taking comments on a school rule it dropped last year

Alaska's education department website still invites the public to weigh in on a school funding rule. "The public comment period is open through July 25, 2025," it says. That deadline passed fourteen months ago, and the State Board of Education voted eleven months ago not to adopt the rule at all.

The rule would have narrowed what counts as a local government's contribution to its schools, matching it to federal definitions for Impact Aid, the money districts receive when they cannot tax nearby federal land. The department's case was a federal test that allows no more than a 25 percent funding gap between a state's best- and worst-funded districts. Alaska failed that test for fiscal 2026 and is appealing. Failing it can cost the state the right to count Impact Aid toward its share of school funding, and a department emergency finding last year warned that the consequences could exceed $80 million.

Districts pushed back hard. More than 600 comments arrived in five weeks. Unalaska's superintendent estimated the rule would cost that district $1.7 million to $3.5 million, and a Sitka commenter put Sitka's loss at up to $4 million. Those were opponents' own estimates; the department said the rule reached only municipal contributions, not grants, private fundraising or tribal support.

In October 2025 the board voted unanimously to take no action and to send the department back to districts for more input. One member asked the department to work with a representative group of districts and return with an update or proposed action by the March meeting.

The subject does not appear in the board's public record since. It is not in the approved minutes of the January or March meetings, or on the June agenda. That establishes an absence from the record rather than that no work happened; conversations with superintendents by phone or at their own meetings would not show up in board minutes.

Separately, the federal government certified Alaska's school funding formula for fiscal 2027 in August. The fiscal 2026 finding is still under appeal.

The board meets next Oct. 13 and 14 in Sitka.