Anchorage School District officials are proposing to erase more than 500 staff positions, increase class sizes, eliminate many sports and make other cutbacks to close a massive budget gap next school year.
“We’re laying off dozens of employees in departments across the district,” Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said in an interview Monday. “We’ll be the leanest that we’ve been in over 15 years, and probably even leaner than that, and we still were forced to increase class sizes by four.”
Bryantt said the district must make major cuts to close a projected $90 million budget deficit for the 2026-27 school year, which he attributed to years of flat state funding. He said that deficit takes into account the $700 increase to the state’s per-student funding formula, called the Base Student Allocation, that the Alaska Legislature approved last year…