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Bill Holt and Mark Osterman will have to deal with many issues if elected to the District 7 seat in the race for the school board. Funding will, undoubtedly, take center stage, and the Kasilof men have strong feelings about where money should come from and how it should be used.

Some in the community have proposed a seasonal suspension of sales tax on food items, and Holt and Osterman said it would be hard to deny the effects this would have on the school district.

"One hundred percent of the borough sales tax is dedicated to funding the school district. However, this amount is not the total funding the borough provides to the district," Holt said. "The remaining funding is made up from primarily property taxes. If the funds collected from sales tax are decreased and the borough wants to continue funding schools to the cap, it would likely require increasing property taxes.

"... Does the borough want to continue funding schools to the cap? If this answer is yes, what is the most equitable way to achieve this? I support fully funding our schools and think that the fairest way to do this is through the current balance of sales and property taxes."

Osterman offered a different view.

"At present, the funds available for the school district come from the borough. They have a tremendous amount of extra cash that they have never had before. If you don't believe me, go buy a gallon of gas and look at the sales tax on it," he said.

He didn't take the view that government was a "business" that loses money or makes money.

"Government is a legalized parasite that takes from the people to fulfill the demands of the people. If the people want to cut taxes, the school board has to learn to live with it," he said.

"The borough funds to the cap in part from funds from sales tax and from other revenues. It may diminish the amount that is available, but that should not preclude reaching the cap administered by the borough. We must remember that because we want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, we can only spend what the people want us to spend and what they are willing to give us."

Osterman said it is important to remember the school district exists to serve, not command, the people.

"We do not enslave our citizens. If we have to make cuts and adjustments, we shall. Any school board that thinks it can dictate to the citizens how much money they must give or else, will not survive long," he said.

In the past year, the Legislature has made great strides in the area of education funding, but both candidates said more needs to be done.

"Forward funding and the implementation of area cost differential has been a great asset to our school district. Not knowing what funding was available until the end of the school year was painful for everyone, especially those nontenured teachers who did not know if they had a job the next year," Holt said.

He said it was difficult for the administration to lose good teachers because they could not rehire teachers in a timely manner without the assurance that the funding was available to pay them. As was it painful to the tenured teachers who watched their colleagues pack up and head Outside to other jobs, and students who watched good teachers leave for no apparent reason.

"The situation is much better now and should continue to improve as the area cost differential is increased," Holt said. "The Legislature and the governor need to continually look at school funding and make the commitment that education is one of the best in-state investments they can make.

"Now that we are gaining an equal footing in state funding we need to look at what we can do to make our schools better. We have made adequate yearly progress two years in a row, and that will allow us to direct more resources directly to the students. It is important that we continue to ... do whatever we can to reshape No Child Left Behind to fit our district and continue to fully fund schools at the local level," Holt said.

Osterman expressed his concerns differently.

"To my knowledge, we have thrown money at the problem but have never solved it. We come back to the argument of how to fund the rural schools with huge financial demands and infrastructure different than ours and ours is different than Anchorage. Everyone wants a cookie cutter solution -- one that suits all the schools and solves all the problems, but there is no solution," he said.

"Voices get shrill and demands for more from less happens when revenue is short in Juneau. We can expect that this will happen as banks close doors and the economy heads to the Dumpster. (For) example, what villages cannot pay the fuel bill for electricity this year?"

Osterman said there is a need to visit other changes and other solutions from other places.

"Funding sources in the Lower 48 have dried up in places that experience similar remote issues like Alaska. Desperate times demand desperate measures, and I think the time has come that with financial institutions falling off Wall Street like poisoned pigeons, we need to focus on necessary measures."

Joseph Robertia can be reached at joseph.robertia@peninsulaclarion.com.