Mat-Su district may keep some new cuts despite restored state funding

What you need to know:

• The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District may move forward with several new budget cuts despite a veto override vote in the state legislature that restored $7.1 million in funding for the upcoming school year and made those cuts unnecessary.
• The cuts include consolidating bus routes, reducing funding for sports travel, and postponing Chromebook replacements for third and eighth-grade students. The additional reductions are intended to give the district some flexibility in the 2025–26 budget, officials said.
• The district will begin the school year with 159 fewer employees, including the elimination of “hold teachers,” to reduce reliance on savings and maintain flexibility in a tight budget environment. The $272 million budget approved in May included a cut of more than $14 million compared to last year.

PALMER — The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District will likely move forward with an additional series of budget cuts, despite state lawmakers restoring millions in school funding through a recent veto override vote.

The cuts include eliminating about a dozen unique bus routes across Mat-Su and moving those students to newly combined routes, as well as reducing funding to secondary schools for sports-related student travel, school district officials said in an interview Wednesday. The district will also skip the planned replacement of district-provided Chromebooks for most third and eighth grade students, they said. Those computers may be replaced next year instead, they said.

Whether all of those cuts are ultimately implemented will depend on factors like total student enrollment for the 2025–26 school year, which starts next week, and final district costs for teacher health benefits, they said.

About 15,900 students were enrolled for the upcoming year as of Wednesday, with hundreds added daily, District Superintendent Randi Trani said during a school board meeting Wednesday evening. 

The district’s annual budget is based on per-student payments from the state and assumes a final enrollment of 19,164, officials said. 

The additional cuts were identified after a late June education funding veto by Gov. Mike Dunleavy created a new $7.1 million district funding shortfall not factored into Mat-Su’s $272 million budget for the upcoming year, which was finalized in May. That plan included more than $14 million in cuts as compared to last year. 

Rather than assume a successful override was coming, district administrators created a backup plan with new cuts that could be added to a revised budget and approved by the school board during its regular meeting Wednesday.

That revision was ultimately not necessary after lawmakers voted 45–14 on Saturday to override the governor’s veto and restore the promised funding.

Keeping some of those additional cuts on tap, despite the override, could give the district some budgetary wiggle room to deal with guesswork included in their budget, Deputy Superintendent Katie Gardner said in an interview. It could also lower the amount of money the district must spend from its savings account to make up for earlier funding shortfalls, she said.

All told, the district will start the school year next week with 159 fewer employees than last year, including reductions to teaching staff, Trani said during the meeting. Those cuts include the elimination of all so-called “hold teachers,” positions typically used to increase staff when enrollment swells beyond expectations in a certain grade or school, he said.

“What it would mean is that we may need to move staff from one school to another,” he said during the meeting. “We hate doing that, but that’s the reality of the budget we’re living in.”

-- Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com