By Greg Knight, News of the North
Juneau, Alaska (News of the North) — During Monday’s debate on House Bill 69, the state education bill that advocates for an increase to the Base Student Allocation, Homer Rep. Sarah Vance proposed an amendment that would require school districts to publish their budgets and any available audits on their respective district’s public websites.
The amendment would also have required posting budgets and audits on the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development website.
In the end, the amendment failed on a vote of 18 yeas and 21 nays.
“This amendment simply ensures that existing documents are more accessible to the public,” Vance said. “This is all about transparency and more public engagement. A lot of people just don’t know where to find our school district budgets or their audits.”
Vance said the information should be posted on district websites for ease of access by parents and others.
“It’s just a simple common sense reform that says we want to make sure that the parents, the people engaged in the in their local school district, can have this information easily available at their fingertips simply by it being available on the district website,” Vance added.
Sitka Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, the author of HB69, while not necessarily opposing the amendment, said that now is not the right time for an amendment of this kind, and that in the future the state department of education website would be the proper place to post budgetary information.
“We have been funding, and … over the next several years, close to a million dollars in the department to improve the data dashboard,” Himschoot said. “I think at that time, once that dashboard is up and running, this amendment would be very helpful at that point. And then on top of that, I’d just like to point out that the audits are already required … the district must submit their budget to the department … rather than individual districts having to use their administrators time to post this to their own district website, having it on the dashboard for the state would be great, and that work is ongoing in the department.”
As currently written, House Bill 69 would raise the base student allocation, the core of the state’s per-student public school funding formula.
Proponents of the bill say the state has failed to keep up with inflation, while opponents argue that the proposed increase is unaffordable and brings no guarantee that school performance will improve.
