Must Read Alaska Show, with Moms for Liberty- Kenai chapter, focuses on education this week
When I sat in the Alaska House of Representatives for six years, I heard the same refrain every budget season: “We’ve got a teacher recruitment and retention crisis, and the only fix is a defined benefits retirement system.” Superintendents, administrators, and union reps would march into my office, armed with PowerPoint slides and grim statistics, pleading for more money.
It was always about funding—more dollars for salaries, more dollars for pensions, more dollars for infrastructure. And don’t get me wrong, money matters. But after hosting Donna Anderson, Kenai Chapter Chair for Moms for Liberty, on a recent episode of the Must Read Alaska Show, I’m convinced we’ve been missing the forest for the trees.
Our education system isn’t just a funding problem—it’s a competition problem. Parents and students are the revenue stream, and if we don’t start earning back their trust, no amount of cash is going to save our schools.
Let’s start with a basic truth: Alaska’s public schools don’t operate in a vacuum. Parents have choices—charter schools, homeschooling through programs like IDEA, private options, or even moving out of state. Every time a family pulls their kid from a district school, that’s revenue walking out the door. In Alaska, our education funding follows the student through the Base Student Allocation (BSA)—a fancy term for the per-pupil dollar amount the state provides. More students, more money. Fewer students, less money.
It’s that simple. Yet year after year, I’d hear district leaders lament declining enrollment while brushing off the obvious question: Why are families leaving? Donna Anderson gave me a front-row seat to the answer, and it’s not what the suits at the school district want to hear.
Donna taught for 26 years in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District—30 if you count her time subbing and raising kids in the system. She’s a grandma now, retired last year, but she’s still in the fight because she sees what I’ve long suspected: the system’s failing its customers. Parents and students aren’t just stakeholders—they’re the lifeblood of the operation.
Donna told me about classrooms packed with 30 kids, curriculum that’s either age-inappropriate or flat-out ineffective, and a bureaucracy that’s more interested in checking boxes than listening to the people it serves. “Our students are our revenue stream,” she said on the show, and she’s dead right. But instead of competing to keep them, too many districts act like they’ve got a monopoly—and they’re shocked when families vote with their feet.