School Districts File Lawsuit Saying Alaska Has Failed to Adequately Fund Education

This article was originally published in Alaska Beacon.

Two school districts have filed a lawsuit challenging the state of Alaska for failing to fulfill its constitutional duty to adequately fund public education.

The Fairbanks North Star Borough School District and the Kuspuk School District filed the lawsuit in Anchorage Superior Court on Tuesday, naming the Alaska Department of Early Education and Development, Deena Bishop as its commissioner, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy as defendants.

Plaintiffs say the state’s funding is “woefully insufficient,” resulting in a loss of teachers, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating schools, and loss of learning and opportunities for students. They’re asking the court for a declaration that the state is violating its obligations under the Alaska Constitution, and to remedy the violation by funding education.

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A spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law said education funding decisions should be determined by the Legislature, rather than the courts.

“The state has to be accountable for ensuring that they have established, and they have maintained a system of education within the state,” said Madeline Aguillard, superintendent of the Kuspuk School District. “Because by all evidence from Kuspuk, I believe it’s not being maintained.”

Aguillard spoke by phone Wednesday, as she was managing the evacuation of around 50 students from the Aniak Jr. Sr. High School due to a roof failure earlier this week.

It’s one of many severe school facilities issues facing the Kuspuk School District, and other districts around the state. The estimated cost of deferred maintenance is over $400 million in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, the other plaintiff in the case, said Luke Meinert, its superintendent. That is all while grappling with budget shortfalls, difficulty maintaining teachers and growing class sizes, he said.

“Fairbanks has experienced seven school closures within the last five years,” Meinert said. “With declining revenue from the state and drops in enrollment here locally, that was one of the levers that our Board of Education was forced to pull to balance our budgets in past years.”

“Those school closures have created a tremendous amount of instability within the community and within our families,” he said.

Spokespeople for the office of Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development declined to comment on the lawsuit, and referred questions to the Alaska Department of Law. Sam Curtis, a spokesperson for the department said education policy and funding decisions should be resolved by state lawmakers.

“Litigating this issue would primarily enrich counsel by asking the judiciary to referee budgetary judgments the Constitution assigns to the political branches. Again, the responsible path is legislation—not litigation,” Curtis said by email on Tuesday.

“Although we have not been served with this lawsuit and have not yet had an opportunity to review the claims, the Alaska Constitution does not prescribe a dollar amount for education funding,” he said. “To the contrary, it vests the power of the purse squarely in the Legislature and the Governor.”

Education funding has been an embattled political issue for years, and lawmakers approved an increase to per student funding, known as the base student allocation or BSA, last year — which was vetoed twice by the governor, and then restored in a historic override vote in August.

But plaintiffs say state funding is at a level that fails to provide students with “a sound basic education and meaningful opportunity for proficiency,” and lags far behind operating costs. The BSA has increased by only 2.2% since 2015, according to the lawsuit, while estimated cost of inflation has risen by 37%.

“Every year, it’s based on, ‘Well, this is what we can afford,’ versus ‘We absolutely have to find the funds to deal with this,’” said Caroline Storm, executive director of the non-profit education advocacy group, Coalition for Education Equity which is helping organize the lawsuit.

In addition to the court order, plaintiffs are asking the court to require the state to conduct an adequacy study. The lawsuit alleges the state has never conducted a study of funding levels, calling it a “dereliction of constitutional obligation” because it hasn’t scientifically evaluated if the current funding levels are adequate.

The study they’re asking for would assess the actual cost of delivering education — including teachers, special education, transportation and maintaining school facilities — to compare to current funding levels and identify the gaps.

Plaintiffs cite low test scores as evidence of inadequate funding

The lawsuit asserts the current system is failing “a vast majority of the state’s school age children,” as evidenced by low proficiency in statewide assessments. The plaintiffs say that’s particularly true for rural, low-income and high-need communities.

Last year, just over 67% of Alaska students did not meet grade level requirements for English language arts, nearly 68% failed to meet requirements for math and 62% did not meet requirements for science, according to the lawsuit.

In the Kuspuk School District for the 2024 to 2025 school year, those numbers jumped to 93 to 97% of students who were not meeting grade level requirements in those core subjects. In the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, more than half of students were not meeting those grade level requirements last year.

“The state has failed and refused to fund education at a level that allows the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District and the Kuspuk School District to provide instruction in core subjects, much less provide instruction in those subjects to state-adopted standards,” the lawsuit said.

Districts grapple with teacher shortage, school building maintenance

The Fairbanks district has lost 300 teachers and staff since 2019, according to the lawsuit, and the Kuspuk School District’s teacher shortage has resulted in cuts to all after school programs, arts programs, career and technical education and social studies programs.

More and more students are having to take classes online in the Kuspuk district, Aguillard said. “They come to the physical building, and we facilitate and monitor, and we try our best to be able to do that. But it’s not the education our families and our students are desiring or deserve,” she said.

The Aniak community is now facing the total loss of a school building and gymnasium due to a roof failure.

This week, the roof of the gymnasium, also connected to classrooms and administrative offices was audibly heard cracking and breaking apart. Around 50 students are now displaced.

“Basically it’s opening like a flower,” Aguillard said, due to the foundation shifting. “The engineer immediately was like, ‘You have to get people out of here.’ It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when it’s going to finish collapsing.”

Students from pre-K to 12th grade are joining the community’s other elementary school while the district searches for alternative space to conduct classes and move administration offices, Aguillard said. She said the goal is to conduct a controlled demolition before the total collapse of the building. “It’s completely split, pulling off from the building, and then there’s a split where the buildings are connected together, the old and the new pieces,” she said.

Catastrophic school building failure is not new for the region. The district requested repairs to the school in Sleetmute for over 20 years, and was repeatedly denied, leading to continued deterioration and unsafe conditions for students.

Aguillard pointed out that as a rural district, a Regional Education Attendance Area, known as an REAA, Kuspuk has no local funding from municipalities so it relies entirely on state funding. “And so the BSA, the foundation formula, has to go to all operational needs to ensure that our students are receiving an adequate education,” she said.

The superintendents and Storm acknowledged that state budgets are constrained, and legislators are faced with many competing priorities and political battles around new state revenues.

But Storm said the hope is the lawsuit will also send a message to lawmakers to take bolder action to increase funding for Alaska education.

“I think some direction from a court saying ‘You are chronically underfunding our schools,’ gives enough legislators cover to address the revenue issue, among other things, and make some hard votes, because now there’s a court system saying you need to rectify this problem,” she said.

Meinert emphasized the importance of Alaska education among other state issues. “I can’t think of a better investment in our state than in the children,” he said. “They are our future, and they will dictate the success of the future of this state.”

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Claire Stremple for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.