Education funding veto: Alaska dad group voices strong opposition as supporters say Dunleavy made right move

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - As leaders from a newly-formed group of dozens of central and southeast Alaska dads speak out against Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s education funding veto last week, some supporters of the House Bill 69 veto say it was a necessary step toward improving students’ education.

Leaders for the group, who call themselves Alaska Dads for Economic and Student Capacity, say they formed at the beginning of 2025 in response to how ongoing education funding concerns are impacting students.

With roughly 60 members, group leaders say that through raising funds, they have been able to send members to Juneau to speak with legislators, as well as share advocacy opportunities around Anchorage.

Alaska-raised Matt Blakeslee, an Anchorage member with one kindergarten-age daughter at Bear Valley Elementary and another daughter soon to join her, worries about what he sees as a tremendous change in per-student funding — known as the Base Student Allocation, or BSA — which he said once provided invaluable resources that positively impacted his life.

“We need a minimum $1,000 BSA increase now. Then we, as a state, need to pass more revenue-generating bills to diversify how we get our funding and make sure that education continues to increase with the cost of inflation,” Blakeslee said. “We went from 32nd place when Gov. Dunleavy started an office to 48th, now.

“His flat funding of education has caused us to be last, I don’t see how you can argue with that as an obvious factor of student outcomes or an impact of how much you’re willing to invest in them.”

While the Senate Finance Committee stripped down the bill before it went to floor votes, it still included funding for a $1,000 BSA increase, which supporters have argued is necessary to catch up with years of what they feel has been flat state funding.

In total, if HB 69 had passed, it would have equaled about a $250 million increase, or $6,960 per student.

The governor cited a significantly deteriorated oil tax revenue situation, along with a lack of policy, as reasons for the veto, which echoed statements Dunleavy had made before the bill made its way through both the House and Senate.

Alaska leaders from the group Americans for Prosperity, who opposed HB 69 and support the governor’s veto, say they question why state lawmaker leadership continued advocating for a bill the governor had already been vocal about opposing.

“I was thinking about that. Has leadership given up on education? Why would they pass a bill that was meant to fail? I think that it was a little bit of performative politics. It was for the headlines,” Deputy State Director Quincy Azimi-Tabrizi said. “It was meant to rally people. But I think that when you put politics over progress and compromise across the aisle, our kids are the ones that really lose.”

As an alternative, the governor has introduced a new education bill, including a $560 BSA increase, with additional funding and policy reforms, including reading proficiency and homeschool correspondence funding, which Dunleavy has said makes the increase comparable to a $700 BSA.

Azimi-Tabrizi said she sees the governor’s alternative bill as a step in the right direction due to what she feels is a level of transparency and an acknowledgment that all kids learn differently.

Policy changes within the governor’s alternative bill would include:

• Charter School Reforms: Year-round application windows, faster appeal timelines, streamlined renewals, and protections against unjustified closures—all to make it easier to open and maintain high-quality charter schools.
• Reading Incentive Grants: $21.9 million in performance-based funding to reward reading proficiency and growth for students in grades K–6.
• Correspondence Program Fix: A $13.6 million adjustment to ensure equitable funding for public correspondence students, while preserving flexibility and parental control.
• School Choice Protections: Transparency and accountability in open enrollment, ensuring families have access to the public school that best meets their child’s needs.

“The reforms that I see in this bill really encourage parents to be able to customize their kids’ education in a way that they learn best,” Azimi-Tabrizi said. “I think that families deserve transparency in our schools and to know what’s going on so that they can help home-educate in addition to what they’re learning in the traditional classroom.”

But A-DESC members disagree.

Francis McLaughlin, who has two daughters attending Scenic Park Elementary in Anchorage, said proposed cuts to programs such as IGNITE (Including Gifted Needs in Today’s Education) have been drastic. He feels with this being the third year in a row the governor has vetoed education funding, that any alternative measures, in his view, have come too late.

“It makes my heart sink to talk about the governor’s bill because the HB 69 — the bill that the governor vetoed — was a compromise bill to start with,” McLaughlin said. “What he’s proposing is just diverting more public funds to private schools and allotments, and just diverting more funding from our public schools, where the majority of children go to school.”

“I’ve talked to all different types of parents and they all agree that we need to increase funding in public schools,” McLaughlin went on to say. ”It’s been almost 10 years without any increase to the base during allocation ... It’s just common sense that there needs to be an increase in school funding.”

Azimi-Tabrizi, however, argues that by already spending $22,000 per student per year, and still ending up 49th in national education rankings, she said parents deserve answers on where exactly that money goes before supporting what she calls unsustainable funding increases.

“We’re seeing a deficit in our state budget, and I think with inflation, we’re going to have to sit down and talk about how every dollar has to create value in our education budget,” Azimi-Tabrizi said. “We have to make sure that the money is reaching the students and the teachers, which I think is what’s going to drive us ahead in outcomes and what’s going to make our schools great for Alaska families.”

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