Rep. Bill Elam, R-Nikiski, hosted a town hall discussion and legislative update Saturday at the Nikiski Community Recreation Center.
More than 40 people filled the center’s banquet hall for the event, with extra chairs carted in even as Elam began to speak. He gave an update on legislative discussions around education funding and the Alaska LNG Project, then fielded questions about Alaska’s schools for nearly a full hour.
Elam said he serves on the House committees for education, resources and fisheries. Those are the topics he’s focused on in his first weeks in Juneau.
Though education dominated the conversation Saturday, the meeting touched briefly on energy and fisheries. Elam said the developments from the state and federal government on the Alaska LNG Project are “looking very promising” and that he wants to see the State Board of Fisheries meet on the central Kenai Peninsula.
“Right out of the gate,” Elam said, a lot of focus has been on education. The House Education Committee he serves on has held hearings and heard testimony on House Bill 69, which would increase the amount of money each school district receives per student — the base student allocation — by the average rate of inflation of the last three years plus $1,000 in the coming fiscal year before then providing for two more increases of $404 plus inflation in 2026 and 2027. Elam also discussed an education reform bill introduced and championed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
Elam asked the group, which included several staff of Nikiski Middle/High School, to raise their hands if they were hoping to discuss H.B. 69. Dozens of hands went up.
The issue of stagnant education funding has been raised repeatedly by the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and others this legislative session. Nikiski staff and families championed their school to the KPBSD Board of Education earlier this month — after Nikiski Middle/High was among nine district schools included in an early discussion about possible school closures in the face of a $17 million deficit.
“There is nobody, in either body or in the governor’s office, from what I have seen, that is not wanting to address the issues that we’re currently having,” he said. “The problem with H.B. 69 — and I don’t mean to be overly direct about it — that one’s probably not going to ultimately wind up making it all the way through successfully because it’s, specifically, just money.”
The state isn’t currently generating enough revenue, Elam said, to afford the increase to school funding that the local district and other advocates are asking for.
A solution for education funding is being negotiated by the governor and others, Elam said. While he expects to see an increase in funding before the end of the session, the “biggest question and the biggest challenge” is what that increase looks like and what policy it’s packaged with.
Much of the conversation during the meeting centered on the calls by the governor and others within the Legislature to increase support for and create more charter schools and homeschool programs. Some teachers in attendance said they were frustrated by the repeated demands for accountability and improved test scores from the public school system while students in homeschool don’t participate in the same assessments and aren’t held to the same standard.
Another person said he doesn’t want to see students parceled out into a variety of charter schools at the perceived expense of the community brick-and-mortar schools.
“What is the point of a public education?” he asked. “I thought it was so that kids would have an equal chance at life, so that they have an equal playing field to start out … I think it’s abhorrent that we have these haves and have nots.”
Others said they wanted to see more charter schools opened.
Discussions about accountability are challenging, Elam said, because the word means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, even to the various attendees on Saturday.
Elam said that he doesn’t want to see neighborhood schools go away, but that he also supports “the choices and options that we have.” He said that choice and freedom were inherent in Alaska’s culture.
As the town hall winded down, Elam called on the teachers in attendance to share their suggestions for improving policy and spending in their classrooms. Because a bill that can pass the Legislature and survive the governor’s pen would include both funding and policy, Elam said that he wants to see policy suggestions to improve all the different types of schools in Alaska.
A teacher in the room responded with a call to Elam to reach out to them when he has questions about what’s happening in the classrooms of his district.
Elam recently launched a Facebook page to share updates on his work in the Alaska Legislature. Find it at “Rep. Bill Elam” on Facebook.
Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.
