Two Alaska school districts filed a lawsuit in Anchorage Superior Court on January 20 against the state, governor, and school board, alleging a longstanding failure to adequately fund public education.
In the complaint, Kuspuk School District and Fairbanks-Northstar Borough School District allege that the state is “failing its constitutional obligation” to provide Alaska students with “meaningful opportunities for a sound foundational education and mastery” in important subjects, and to provide schools and districts with sufficient funding to do so.
The plaintiffs are seeking a review of the court order to force the state to meet its constitutional obligations and to determine the cost of a student’s education.
“We believe that the state of Alaska has never conducted an adequacy investigation to truly understand what is needed to give Alaska students a fair opportunity to learn the skills they need to participate and contribute to society,” said trial attorney Matt Singer, representing the plaintiffs. “If you don’t know how much something is going to cost, you can’t talk to Congress about how to fund it.”
The lawsuit points out the effects of a chronic lack of funding, including low scores on skill exams. Reduction in faculty and staff. and the elimination of fine arts, career technical and vocational education programs. It also cites dangerous conditions within the school building.
Over the past year, KYUK, NPR, and ProPublica have focused on the poor health and safety conditions inside many rural school buildings in Alaska. The report found that the state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to repair aging buildings, and that some of the worst conditions exist in state schools.
Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said Gov. Mike Dunleavy has put little money into education since he took office in 2018. “After almost 10 years of starting with nothing, having to somehow raise less than the bare minimum is a huge burden,” Aguillard said.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office referred questions about the lawsuit to the state Department of Justice.
“The responsible path is legislation, not litigation,” Justice Department spokesman Sam Curtis wrote in an email.
The Education Clause of the Alaska State Constitution does not specify how much money will be spent on education. Instead, the Constitution “gives the power of the purse directly to the Legislature and the Governor. Today begins the Legislative Session, where decisions regarding education policy and funding will be debated and resolved,” Curtis wrote.
Fairbanks Superintendent Luke Meinert said it’s no coincidence that the lawsuit was filed on the same day that lawmakers convened in Juneau for this year’s legislative session. “I think this sends a message that the work on education funding is not done yet,” Meinert said.
School board member Deena Bishop did not respond to a request for comment. A department spokesperson also referred questions to the Alaska Department of Justice. Prior to his appointment as commissioner, Bishop served as superintendent of the Anchorage School District, the state’s largest. In that capacity, Bishop consistently advocated for increased state funding for public schools through changes to Alaska’s education funding system. As secretary, Bishop said the department is not responsible for allocating education funds. “The levers I can pull are not levers for funding,” Bishop said in a 2024 interview. “I don’t create the money. It’s Congress that creates the money. But we can certainly support policies that support schools when their needs increase.”
Caroline Storm, executive director of the Alaska-based nonprofit Coalition for Education Equity, which represents school districts and their leaders and helps fund lawsuits, said years of advocacy by her organization and others have “not moved far enough” in the state to cover a wide range of needs, from curriculum to building maintenance. He said the lack of funding for public education should be the focus of this year’s election cycle.
Alaska’s public schools receive funding from two state budgets. Capital funds pay for building maintenance, upgrades, and construction. Operating funds, often referred to as the base student allocation, purchase things like textbooks and pay teacher salaries. According to the complaint, Alaska allocated $5,800 per student in 2015, but over 10 years that number has risen to $5,960, well below the rate of inflation.
Singer said the state is failing on every count. “It takes a lot of different things to provide a basic sound education,” he said. “One is a safe school building with a roof and heating. The other is a competent teacher who stands in front of a classroom and educates young people.”
After years of relatively flat state funding for schools amid rising operating costs, Alaska lawmakers passed a $700 increase to the BSA in the 2025 legislative session, garnering enough support to override Dunleavy’s veto of a bipartisan education bill and later overriding Dunleavy’s veto of $50 million in education funding from the budget. In recent years, lawmakers have been at odds with Dunleavy, who has blamed declining enrollment on school closures and has also called for changes to the state’s open enrollment system and charter school funding policies.
Kuspuku Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said chronic underfunding has a huge impact on districts like hers, where a large portion of the student population is Native American. Gaby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
Advocates praised the funding increase, but many school leaders said it still falls short of what districts need to operate effectively, and plaintiffs in the lawsuit said the increase was “woefully inadequate to keep up with inflation that has eroded purchasing power by 37 percent over the past decade.” Alaska has more than 50 school districts, most of which are located in cities or organized boroughs that generate local tax revenue to help fund education. But 19 organizations rely almost entirely on the state for funding because they serve rural, unincorporated communities where local taxes are not available. Dozens of these rural schools are owned by the state Department of Education, including the Kuspuk district, which covers an area of western Alaska roughly the size of Maryland.
The state assessment data on student performance in the Kuspuk district is “dismal,” according to the complaint. The numbers show that 90% of the district’s 330 students will be proficient in English, art, math and science for the 2024-2025 school year. Superintendent Aguillard said the chronic lack of funding from the state has a huge impact on school districts like hers, where a large portion of the student population is Native American. She said those students are also suffering because her district has had to pull money from its operating budget to keep buildings open. That money was used to repair faulty plumbing and fire suppression systems, as well as repair problems with leaks in the building’s foundation and roof.
Earlier this month, Aguillard received a call from an architect informing her that most of the joists supporting the roof of her school’s gymnasium in Aniak were broken. “We will close the high school immediately and begin plans to demolish it before it falls apart,” she wrote in a text message. For the past three years, experts have said that at least three buildings in her district should not be occupied.
This winter, eight of the nine buildings in the Kuspuk district were unable to open in time for students to return from vacation because they lacked running water, heat, and electricity due to a prolonged period of extreme cold. Most of the buildings in this district are owned by the Alaska Department of Education.
“I’m worried,” Aguillard said. “Our buildings shouldn’t be closed so easily. This is really just evidence that the capacity of those buildings is decreasing.”
Dozens of studies cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on its website highlight that inadequate maintenance and environments within schools negatively impact student performance. An investigation found black mold in several schools in Alaska. Exposure can increase the risk of asthma, leading to higher rates of absenteeism. According to the agency, leaky roofs and heating and ventilation problems can also affect academic performance.
However, this situation is not unique to rural school districts. In an interview, Fairbanks Superintendent Meinert described the specific impact the $5 million deficit has had on the district, one of the three largest in the state.
In the past five years, his district has closed seven schools due to budget shortfalls. Meinert said his district has laid off more than 300 teachers since 2019, more than double the class sizes reported in the state by the National Center for Education Statistics five years ago, sometimes exceeding 40 students in a classroom.
Meinert argues that the lack of state funding within the district also disproportionately impacts minority students. More than 76 percent of Indigenous and economically disadvantaged students in the district are not proficient in English, according to state assessments.
