This story has been updated to include Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of some education funding in the state budget.
A six-member legislative task force on education that includes two Juneau members will spend the next 18 months reviewing funding, school accountability and other issues that were part of a contentious debate at the Alaska State Capitol this year, members of the task force announced Wednesday.
The task force is part of an education bill passed by the Legislature that increases per-student funding and implements several statewide policy changes. Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the bill because he said it failed to address priority issues of his — with the Legislature overriding the bill on the last day of the session and supporters saying one purpose of the task force is taking a closer look at those issues.
“A task force gives you a chance to look at the issues without a specific bill on a specific deadline,” Sen. Jesse Kiehl (D-Juneau), a member of the Senate Education Committee, said Wednesday. “You can bring more people to the table when it’s a meeting.”
“When you’re in a legislative hearing you’ve got votes, you got amendments and it’s harder to have just a conversation. So I think there’s opportunities to really get down into the details and look for creative solutions with a task force that are sometimes harder with legislation, especially when some of these issues have gotten locked up in the legislative process.”
House Bill 57 is most notorious for a $700 increase to the $5,960 Base Student Allocation for schools. Dunleavy vetoed $200 of that increase when he signed the budget on Thursday, with legislative leaders stating they will likely try to override that veto when they reconvene in January.
HB 57 also specifies the task force “will analyze several factors, including school accountability, chronic absenteeism, and open enrollment between school districts,” according to a press release issued Wednesday by the Senate majority press office. The six members include three each from the House and Senate, with two majority caucus members and one minority caucus member from each chamber.
A task force organizational meeting is planned for mid-to-late August, followed by monthly meetings until the start of the 2026 legislative session, the release states. The task force is scheduled to continue its work until Jan. 31, 2027.
“I’m not sure what’s going to rise to the top at our meetings,” Rep. Andi Story (D-Juneau), co-chair of the House Education Committee, said Wednesday when asked what agendas for the initial meetings might look like. “To me we have so many issues in education that are just critical to attend to. I want to tackle the funding issues myself, but it’ll just depend, I think, on the preferences of the committee members. And again, things are happening all the time so I’m not sure what’s going to be a priority as we go along.”
Dunleavy told education officials before the end of the session he planned to use a line-item veto on some of the extra BSA funds — an unprecedented cut to the per-student formula defined in state law, although cuts to one-time funding have previously occurred. The $200 cut chool districts will find themselves with less money than they have for the current fiscal year until at least January when the Legislature can attempt another veto override.
Among the policy concessions he sought were allowing students to enroll at any district statewide regardless of their home district and making it easier to establish new charter schools that he says perform better in Alaska than existing traditional public schools. Legislators, during the final days of the session, said such changes were far too complex to approve without a proper evaluation of their impacts — hence the establishment of the task force in HB 57.
Besides Kiehl, the Senate members are Löki Tobin (D-Anchorage) who chairs the education committee and Mike Cronk (R-Tok), the lone minority member of that five-person committee. House members, besides Story, are House Education Committee Co-Chair Rebecca Hinschoot (I-Sitka) and Justin Ruffridge (R-Soldotna) a minority member who a year ago co-chaired a Republican-led education committee.
All six task force members are among the 46 legislators who voted to override Dunleavy’s veto. But Kiehl said that with three Democrats, two Republicans and a nonpartisan member “this is not going to be a factory for the left” when it comes to issues considered and recommendations made.
“This is going to be a policy group,” he said. “We’re going to work with stakeholders. We’re going to work with districts. We’re going to work with interested Alaskans.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
