This article was produced in collaboration with the Anchorage Daily News and KYUK Public Media, which have both been members of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
Two Alaska school districts filed a lawsuit on Jan. 20 in Anchorage Superior Court against the state, its governor, and its education commissioner over what they say is a long-running failure to adequately fund public education.
In the complaint, the Kuspuk School District and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District argue “the state is failing to meet its constitutional obligation” to provide Alaska students “a sound basic education and meaningful opportunity for proficiency” in vital subjects, and to fund schools and school districts sufficiently to do that.
The plaintiffs are seeking to force the state to fulfill its constitutional obligation, and are requesting a court-ordered study to determine what it costs to educate students.
“Alaska, we don’t believe, has ever done an adequacy study to really understand what it would take to allow Alaska students a fair opportunity to learn the skills they need to participate and contribute to society,” said Matt Singer, a trial attorney representing the plaintiffs. “If you don’t know what something is going to cost, then you can’t have a conversation with the Legislature about how to fund it.”
The lawsuit points to the effects of chronic underfunding: low proficiency test scores, reductions in teaching staff, and the elimination of fine arts as well as career technical and vocational education programs. It also cites dangerous conditions inside school buildings.
Over the last year, KYUK, NPR, and ProPublica have spotlighted poor health and safety conditions inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. The reporting showed how the state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings and that some of the worst conditions exist at state-owned schools.
Kuspuk School District Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said that since Gov. Mike Dunleavy took office in 2018, he has put little money toward education. “That’s almost a decade of just starting at nothing, and when you have to claw your way to even less than minimal funding that takes a toll,” Aguillard said.
A spokesperson with the governor’s office referred questions about the lawsuit to the Alaska Department of Law.
“The responsible path is legislation — not litigation,” Alaska Department of Law spokesperson Sam Curtis wrote in an email.
The education clause in Alaska’s constitution does not specify a dollar amount for education. Instead, wrote Curtis, the constitution “vests the power of the purse squarely in the Legislature and the Governor. The legislative session began today. That is where education policy and funding decisions are meant to be debated and resolved.”
It’s not a coincidence the suit was filed on the same day legislators convened in Juneau for the 2026 legislative session, said Fairbanks Superintendent Luke Meinert. “I think it sends the message that the work on education funding is not done,” he said.
Alaska Department of Education and Early Development Commissioner Deena Bishop did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for her department also referred questions to the Alaska Department of Law. Prior to her appointment as commissioner, Bishop was superintendent of the Anchorage School District, the state’s largest. In that position, Bishop consistently advocated for increased state funding for public schools through a change to Alaska’s education funding formula. As commissioner, Bishop has said her department is not responsible for allocating funds for education. “The levers that I can pull aren’t levers for funding,” Bishop said in a 2024 interview. “I don’t create the money. The Legislature creates that, but we can certainly support policy that would help support schools as their needs come up.”
Caroline Storm, executive director of the Coalition for Education Equity, an Alaska-based nonprofit organization representing school districts and their leadership that is helping finance the lawsuit, said years of advocacy from her organization and others simply “hasn’t moved the needle enough” in the state to pay for wide-ranging needs from curriculum to building maintenance. She said the lack of financial support for public education should be central to this year’s election cycle.
Alaska’s public schools receive funding from two state budgets. Capital funds pay for building maintenance, upgrades, and construction. Money for operations, often referred to as the Base Student Allocation (BSA), buys things like textbooks and pays for teachers’ salaries. According to the complaint, Alaska allocated $5,800 per student in 2015. Over a decade the number has risen to $5,960, significantly less than the rate of inflation.
In all regards, Singer said, the state is failing. “In order to provide a basic sound education you need a lot of different things,” he said. “One of the things is a safe school building with a roof and heater. Another thing you need is a competent teacher standing in front of a classroom educating young people.”
After years of relatively flat state funding for schools amid rising operational costs, Alaska lawmakers during the 2025 legislative session passed a $700 increase to the BSA, then gained enough support to override Dunleavy’s veto of the bipartisan education bill — and later overrode his 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 who has also called for a statewide open enrollment system and for policy changes to benefit charter schools.
While advocates celebrated the funding increase, many education leaders have said it still falls short of what school districts need to effectively operate, and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit said the increase was “woefully insufficient to keep pace with inflation, which had eroded purchasing power by 37% in the preceding decade.” There are more than 50 school districts in Alaska, and most are located within cities or organized boroughs, which have access to local tax revenue to help fund education. But 19 are almost entirely reliant on the state for funds because they serve rural, unincorporated communities where money from local taxes is not available. Dozens of those rural school buildings are owned by the state education department, including in the Kuspuk School District, which covers an area in Western Alaska that’s roughly the size of Maryland.
State assessment data on student performance within the Kuspuk School District is “dire,” according to the legal complaint. The numbers show that 90% of the district’s 330 students during the 2024-2025 school year were not proficient in English language arts, math, or science. Aguillard, the superintendent, said chronic underfunding from the state is having an outsized impact on districts like hers, where the student population is predominantly Indigenous. She said those students also suffer because her district has had to pull funds from its operational budget to keep buildings open. That money has gone to fix failing plumbing and fire suppression systems, and to help repair problems with building foundations and leaky roofs.
Earlier this month, Aguillard got word from an architect that most of the joists that hold up the roof of the school gym in Aniak are broken. “We are closing the high school immediately and beginning plans to demolish before it collapses,” she wrote in a text message. In the last three years, experts have said at least three buildings in her district should not be occupied.
This winter, a prolonged and extreme cold snap meant that eight of the Kuspuk School District’s nine buildings could not open in time for students to return from the holiday break because there was no running water, heat, or electricity. The majority of the buildings in the district are owned by Alaska’s education department.
“It’s unsettling,” Aguillard said. “Our buildings should not be shutting down so easily. It’s really just evidence of the decline of the capacity of those buildings.”
On its website, dozens of studies cited by the United States Environmental Protection Agency highlight the negative effects of poor maintenance and conditions inside schools on student performance. The investigation found black mold inside several Alaska schools. Exposure can increase the risk of asthma and is linked to higher rates of absenteeism. According to the agency, leaking roofs and problems with heating and ventilation can also impact academic performance.
The situation isn’t unique to rural school districts, however. In an interview, Meinert, the Fairbanks superintendent, described the tangible impact a $5 million budget deficit has had in his district, one of the three largest in the state.
In the last five years, seven schools in Meinert's district have closed due to a budget shortfall. Since 2019, Meinert said, his district has terminated more than 300 teaching positions, which means class sizes have swelled to more than double what the National Center for Education Statistics reported for the state five years ago, sometimes topping 40 students in a classroom.
Meinert contends that a lack of state financial support within his district is also disproportionately impacting the minority student population. State assessments show that more than 76% of Indigenous and economically disadvantaged students in the district are not proficient in English language arts.
