An empty classroom at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé in Juneau, Alaska, on July 20, 2022.
Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop told board members that the state used the account to pay the temporary employees who administered its grants. “The actual ARPA funds that were meant for school districts have already been dispersed and are already used, and there’s not a problem with them,” she said.
The maintenance of equity provision said that states are not allowed to reduce the amount of funding per student to certain school districts below the amount they received in 2019, the year directly preceding the pandemic. The covered districts include schools that serve high-poverty areas or high-needs students. This is where federal officials say Alaska has run afoul of their guidance; some districts got less state money in 2022 than they did in 2019.
In an April presentation to the Senate Education Committee, Reid explained that there are three state education finance strategies that can cause them to not comply with the federal law: a per-student funding formula, a mechanism to equalize spending and a “hold harmless” provision, aimed at preventing districts from experiencing cuts in aid. Alaska employs all three strategies.
“This amount represents the additional funds that would be owed to the district for FY2023 if the U.S. Department of Education were to prevail in its interpretation that MOEquity applies to Alaska notwithstanding the lack of a statewide funding cut, and also takes into account elements of Alaska’s state funding formula that distort MOEquity calculations,” she wrote.
Senate Education Committee Chair Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said her office has been in communication with federal officials who have said they can no longer accommodate Alaska’s noncompliance. She said federal officials gave no indication they would accept the agency’s compromise offer.