Anchorage School District Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said the district is working to hire more teachers ahead of the start of the school year.
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In July, the Anchorage School Board approved the hiring of 60 teachers using a one-time funding boost from the state Legislature. At a recent board meeting this month, Bryantt said the board approved hiring more.
“We made a decision to take a calculated risk and invest about $6 million in fund balance towards hiring even more teachers,” he said. “So that work has been ongoing, and that’s with the understanding that it does seem likely that school districts will receive funding from the state.”
The district won’t know exactly how much additional money it will get from the state until the Department of Revenue certifies the amount at the end of August, Bryantt said.
The recent spending for Anchorage teachers helps to refill some of the more than 300 positions the school board cut to address a $90 million budget deficit ahead of this school year. The school board also voted to close three schools.
Bryantt said he’s optimistic that the funding turmoil hasn’t impacted students’ academic achievements, both in testing and with rolling out a career pathways program.
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“I’ve seen this last year when I saw the increases in math proficiency in ASD eighth graders, and I’m seeing it again in the preliminary state data on AK STAR (Alaska System of Academic Readiness),” Bryant said. “It looks like ASD is going to be outperforming the state averages in ELA (English/Language Arts) and math in numerous areas.”
The school district still faces a structural budget deficit going into next school year, to the tune of about $40 million, Bryantt said. With a new governor set to take office in December, he said a big question mark on state support for education remains.
“I really do gravitate and respect the candidates that are willing to be courageous and say that now is the moment for us to admit that it’s not okay for districts not to know their budget until after school has already started,” Bryantt said. “This has happened this year, and last year we didn’t know our funding till two weeks before the school year started. This is not okay. It cannot be normalized.”
The district will soon roll out a new ASD Listens initiative to get a better sense of how the community feels on school topics, including a series of targeted surveys, polls and other forms of outreach, Bryantt said.
Anchorage students will start school in a staggered manner, with grades 1 through 6 and grade 9 returning Wednesday, Aug. 19. Grades 7 and 8 and 10 to 12 start on Thursday. Kindergarten and preschool students start school the next Wednesday, Aug. 26.
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