CS FOR SENATE BILL NO. 52(FIN) "An Act relating to education; requiring the Department of Education and Early Development to provide information relating to public schools on an Internet website; relating to information on the post- secondary education, career path, and residency of graduates from high schools in the state; relating to transportation of students; relating to state funding for districts operating residential schools; increasing the base student allocation; and providing for an effective date." 8:10:41 AM Co-Chair Foster invited the bill sponsor and her staff to the table. He recognized Senator Scott Kawasaki in the room. Co-Chair Foster asked the sponsor to provide remarks on the bill. SENATOR LOKI TOBIN, SPONSOR, asked her staff to provide a brief overview of the bill. MIKE MASON, STAFF, SENATOR LOKI TOBIN, relayed that late in the 2023 legislative session, SB 52 was amended into SB 140 in the House Finance Committee. He intended to explain how SB 52 was drafted. Additionally, he would outline some of the provisions that had been included and removed from SB 140. The bill included multiple references to chapter 40 SLA 2022, which was the Alaska Reads Act passed under HB 114 on the last day of the 2022 session. He detailed that SB 52 was drafted in January 2023 prior to the full implementation of the Alaska Reads Act, which was the reason many of the provisions in the current bill were tied to the effective dates of the Alaska Reads Act. Most often, the effective date was July 1, 2023. He had spoken to the Legislative Legal Services drafter the previous day and confirmed that the bill would be cleaned up significantly if there were a committee substitute (CS) because the linkage between the Alaska Reads Act was currently broken. He elaborated that the Alaska Reads Act was fully implemented, and the effective dates had passed. The bill would be cleaned up by a CS because much of the reference to the Alaska Reads Act would be removed. Mr. Mason relayed that Section 1 amended AS 14.03.120, the statute governing reporting requirements for the Department of Education and Early Development (DEED). The bill added subsection (k), which required DEED to establish and maintain a website that would serve as a data dashboard for information about schools and student performance. The new subsection (M) added by the Senate Finance Committee directed the Department of Labor and Workforce Development (DLWD) to collaborate with DEED to gather data on the progress of each high school graduating class in the district. The provision required the departments to gather the data every five years until 20 years after the high school graduation date of the high school class. He shared that Senator Tobin had worked with Senator Click Bishop on the concept. The goal was to try to track students post- graduation to gather data in order for the legislature to make good policy choices. Currently, much of the information was unavailable or very challenging to obtain. 8:14:48 AM Mr. Mason relayed that Section 2 of the legislation amended Section 15 of the Alaska Reads Act to add subsection 20 requiring DEED to collaborate with DLWD to gather the data. The bill contained several sections that would codify the relationship between DEED and DLWD. Section 3 would amend state law to add back collaboration. Section 4 would repeal and reenact AS 14.09.010, the statute governing student transportation services. He detailed that AS 14.09.010(a) would increase the per student amount to school districts for pupil transportation by about 11 percent. The provision was added into the Senate Finance Committee. Section 5 would amend AS 14.16.200(b), the statute governing state funding for school districts operating residential schools. The section added by the Senate Finance Committee, would increase the per pupil maximum monthly stipend to cover room and board expenses by 50 percent. Mr. Mason continued reviewing the bill. Section 6 amended the Alaska Reads Act to increase the Base Student Allocation (BSA) by an additional $680 in FY 24. He noted it was the relationship between the Alaska Reads Act and the BSA increase that would be broken if a CS were created. He expounded that the Alaska Reads Act included the $30 BSA increase, and Section 4 of the bill further amended it to increase the BSA by another $680. He reiterated that the current version of the bill was linked in several places to the Alaska Reads Act. He clarified that the initial version of SB 52 included a simple $1,000 BSA increase. He highlighted that the Legislative Finance Division (LFD) estimated that each $100 change in the BSA was projected to increase state funding by around $25.7 million. Mr. Mason noted that version B of the bill added a second BSA increase of $348 in FY 25 and a single year inflation adjustment in FY 26. He explained that the BSA increase in the second year and the inflation adjustment had been removed from the bill by the Senate Finance Committee. Additionally, the FY 24 BSA increase was lowered to $680, which mirrored the BSA increase considered in the House. He noted that the dollar amount increase was also the equivalent to the one-time education funding included in the FY 24 budget and in the House and Senate versions of the FY 25 budget. He reminded the committee that the governor had vetoed half of the education funding increase in 2023, which left an additional $87 million in one-time education funding for FY 24. Section 7 amended statute detailing the duties of DLWD to include the tracking of students post-graduation. Mr. Mason relayed that the final sections were the effective dates. Section 8 set the effective date of the increased pupil transportation, Sections 9 and 11 related to the collaboration between DEED and DLWD and mirrored the effective date of the Alaska Reads Act reporting requirements and the effective date for the online data dashboard would be July 1, 2024. Section 10 was the effective date clause for student transportation, residential schools, BSA, and tracking students post- graduation provisions of the bill, which were all linked to the Alaska Reads Act effective date of July 1, 2023. Section 12 stipulated the reporting requirements for tracking students post-graduation would take effect on July 1, 2025. He clarified that if a CS were to be drafted, the bill would be simplified and would be much shorter. 8:18:57 AM Co-Chair Edgmon discussed that when the governor vetoed SB 140, there was a reference to comprehensive education reform that the governor felt was not adequate. He stated that it was clear where the governor wanted to go with charter schools. He asked if SB 50 got closer to the goal. Senator Tobin answered that all of the testimony received in the Senate Education Committee specified that reforms best occurred at the local level provided by the individuals who were the closest to the students attending the schools. The committee heard that the most effective way to make shifts in student outcomes was to empower classroom educators and administrators to ensure there were school counselors, guidance counselors, and nutrition specialists who were not contracted out. She relayed that each community needed something different and a statewide approach to reform would not produce the desired outcomes in every community. Senator Tobin highlighted that the Northwest Arctic School Borough recently redevised all of its science curricula to be rooted in local indigenous knowledge. She explained that it was reform that would impact the community, but it would not be the right reform for the Anchorage School District or potentially for a Southeast school district. She believed that instead of trying to figure out from an overarching state approach, an investment in schools, locally designed curricula systems, local school boards, and local classroom educators was the best way to improve student outcomes. She remarked that it also led to a reduction in class size, which was one of the single most effective indicators of how to improve student outcomes. She relayed that it would also lead to better teacher retention, which was another predictor of how to improve student outcomes. It would also improve the leadership pipeline, which was directly related to the retention of educators. She stated that all of the aforementioned items led to better education outcomes and would come from local decisions made at the local level. 8:21:27 AM Co-Chair Edgmon shared that he had strong feelings about the Alaska Reads Act when it had been implemented a couple of years ago. He clarified that it had not been about the law per se, but that it had been underfunded with a $30 BSA. He referenced an article published in the Ketchikan Sentinel in the past six weeks about the significant catch up work needed to properly resource the Alaska Reads Act. He was not certain any current proposals under consideration by the legislature would accomplish that. The issue was still a concern and he hoped at some point the state addressed the schools with teachers in the rd kindergarten through 3 grade who were struggling. Senator Tobin agreed. The original fiscal notes for the Alaska Reads Act were initially twice what they had been when the bill passed. She pointed out that other states had significantly resourced their implementation of evidence based reading strategies and incredible outcomes. Alaska was already seeing movement in many of its schools and there would be better improvement if the program was funded. Representative Stapp stated that the committee had heard and passed the vast majority of the bill in the past. He did not see any change reflecting items in the governor's veto letter [pertaining to SB 140] in SB 52. He noted that the bill included provisions that he did not believe had been passed previously by the House Finance Committee including the data dashboard and long term tracking of post high school graduates. He wondered about focusing on something they had not tried rather than something that they had. Senator Tobin responded that the constitution directed the legislature to maintain a system of public schools; it was the legislature's obligation to do so. The bill before the committee reflected the Senate majority's proposal of doing so effectively, efficiently, and for the maximum benefit of all of the state's public school systems. The legislature had heard in public testimony and recognized through the stakeholders' engagement that the crisis still existed. She stated it was the legislature's responsibility to pass good public policy by making sure policies were well vetted and informed. She hoped that if the bill were to pass the legislature, that all legislators would encourage the governor to sign the legislation. She emphasized that the legislature needed to pass good public policy to improve/help its schools and help its communities. 8:25:09 AM Representative Coulombe thanked Senator Tobin for all of her work on education. She remarked that the bill encompassed a lot of good aspects. She looked at the user friendly website and guardrails around it. She could currently look up a school to see how much each student cost and their test scores. She asked what the website proposed in the bill would offer that was not already available. Senator Tobin responded that two aspects of the data dashboard should be considered. First, the department had been using leftover Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) from federal COVID-19 relief resources to create the beginning of a dashboard; however, the department was not currently statutorily required to provide the information to parents. The goal was to help provide statutory guardrails to ensure that information going into the hands of parents was user friendly, easily downloadable and comparable, and interactive. Additionally, the goal was to ensure every district and community was able to access the resource. She noted that there was low bandwidth issues in some rural communities; therefore, the bill provided additional guardrails to ensure that when the next steps of the information system were available to every parent everywhere. Representative Coulombe asked how realistic tracking graduates was. She noted the timeframe was long and it was difficult to find people for that length of time. She wondered if DLWD had told Senator Tobin it was something it could easily do or if it would be an uphill climb. Senator Tobin replied that DLWD already did the work and was producing reports on the information. She elaborated that instead of doing the work episodically with graduating classes identified by the department, the bill would ensure the work was done with every graduating class in order to have better information when considering shifts and tweaks to improve education outcomes. Mr. Mason clarified that the [DLWD] Trends magazine was included with information on SB 52, but he was not certain he had included it in members' bill packets. The information was available online. He shared that the department had come in to talk about the process. He elaborated that the information gathering had been a one- time thing, but DLWD had communicated the desire to try to collect the data as envisioned in the bill. He directed members' attention to the DLWD fiscal note, OMB component 336. The note specified that the department could do the work with current staff at a cost of approximately $30,000. He stated that the work was something he believed the department could do and that it was looking forward to trying to do. Representative Coulombe asked for clarification about the transportation funding. She asked if the funding was retroactive. Mr. Mason responded that because of all of the linkages to the Alaska Reads Act, the funding would essentially go back to the current fiscal year, FY 24. He elaborated that if the committee introduced a CS, it could update the date to FY 25. He relayed that the hope had been that SB 52 would pass the previous year; therefore, it was drafted as if it would pass early in the 2023 session, which would have enabled school districts to use the money for the FY 24 fiscal year. The way the bill was currently written, the funding would be retroactive; however, he was anticipating there would be a CS, which would change the effective date to FY 25. 8:29:48 AM Representative Coulombe remarked that the Alaska Reads Act was likely the biggest statewide reform she had seen. She pointed out that there were cases where reforms could apply to the entire state. She understood there were regional differences. She asked if there was anything statewide that could be part of the reform category that would support the Alaska Reads Act. She shared the concerns with Representative Edgmon that it was an important piece. She wondered if other ideas that could be applied statewide had been discussed when considering the bill. Senator Tobin answered that the Senate Education Committee heard from many education advocates, stakeholders, and experts over the past two years on things that could be done from a statewide perspective. She expounded that items included helping to deal with chronic absenteeism, which was impacting all of the state's districts. Additionally, looking at youth experiencing homelessness, which had an incredible strain in Alaska's communities. She referenced a recent DOJ report on behavioral health and the need to expand school-based services so the state did not continue to send young Alaskans out of state to get behavioral health support. She believed a bill on that topic would hopefully be heard soon by the House. Senator Tobin believed that tribal compacting could have some incredible impacts in Alaska. She relayed that for the past three years the State of Alaska had been exploring how it may enter into contractual agreements with tribal entities to help improve education outcomes. The bill was forthcoming; the legislature had not yet seen a regulatory or statutory package from the governor's office. She explained that there had been a robust public process on the topic as the legislature continued to work on what potential legislative interventions may be. She noted that some of the other things the legislature heard regarding charter school access and increasing correspondence funds were new in the current year. She personally believed in a deliberative, slow, incremental process when it came to transformational change and implementing the changes because she did not want deleterious effects to impact students. Senator Tobin relayed that the Senate Education Committee had several hearings with charter schools, charter school families, and school boards. The committee had been told it was not a new authorizer that was needed. The committee had learned that having charter schools rooted in local community was critical. She elaborated that having families be able to come together to specify desired education options for their students meant the local engagement existed from the beginning including going to their local school board to talk about how ideas may be supported by the local community and going forward in the approval process. She noted that the state board was the final authorizer for all charter schools in the state. She explained that it would not necessarily result in better outcomes if the process was shifted away from local communities. The committee had heard that charter schools needed legal help. She detailed there were charter schools in the Fairbanks area that had signed predatory loans with facilities and were unable to get out of the contracts. She noted that the bill previously vetoed by the governor [SB 140] had included support for existing charter schools to enable them to continue to improve their systems and potentially serve more students. She thought it was very reasonable comprehensive reform that was informed by communities. She wanted to ensure that any changes would improve student outcomes, not necessarily contribute to destabilizing the system. Representative Coulombe asked how Senator Tobin felt about the charter school language in Representative McKay's bill where they [the state board] could authorize a charter school but the school could shop around for a school district to avoid forcing a charter school on one school district. Senator Tobin replied that she had concerns, but she was interested in hearing more about the idea in the Senate Education Committee. Particularly, she thought about federal impact aid; Alaska was the only state with the ability to deduct federal impact aid from its state aid, which meant there was a $90 million cost savings for providing education to all of Alaska's students. She elaborated that currently there could not be more than a 25 percent difference between one district that received the lowest revenue and the district that received the highest revenue. She considered what it would mean for schools competing in districts. For example, she asked which district had to count a charter school to their revenue level if the Nome school decided to establish a charter school in Anchorage. She questioned whether it would impact the Nome district or Anchorage School District. Additionally, she wondered whether it would push the state out of compliance with federal impact aid and federal disparity tests. She did not know the answer and believed it was necessary to have the conversations. She also wondered who would be responsible for providing mental health services and guidance counseling to the students. Under the example she provided, she wondered if the services would come from the Anchorage School District or the Nome School District. She believed the questions were best flushed out in the public process. 8:35:50 AM Representative Coulombe stated if felt like that was how correspondence schools worked currently where the funds were going to one area and the students were somewhere else. She did not know if it was impacting the disparity test. She asked Senator Tobin if she thought it would function the same way as correspondence. Senator Tobin responded that the state was starting to see how it would impact communities. She relayed that the State of Alaska failed its maintenance of equity test, which was a stipulation on the state's federal ESSER relief funding. She elaborated that the state had failed the test because so many students from particular districts - Anchorage and Kenai for FY 22 left their local districts and went to correspondence programs outside of their communities, taking the funding with them. The situation resulted in a substantial decrease to average pupil spending in communities even though the students still lived in those communities. She stated the situation was having real repercussions in Alaska. Due to the state's failure to meet maintenance of equity, it currently had a high risk designation for its ESSER grants and potentially it would be required to pay back all $359 million to the federal government if it did not move back into compliance. She stressed that there needed to be more insight and input into the ramifications before moving forward with any additional programs that may have the same impacts. 8:37:33 AM Co-Chair Foster stated his plan was to try to get all of the education bills before the committee to find a path forward. He realized SB 52 came far before the broadband bill ended up being what it was. He wanted to make sure the committee had all of the tools to work from. He noted that Representative McKay's bill, HB 392, was also in the committee. He explained that if the committee moved forward with HB 392 it would have to go through the committee process on the Senate side, which would take time. He stated that one option was to modify the Senate bill and move it forward, which would then need concurrence in the Senate. Representative Ortiz appreciated Senator Tobin's comments about her overall preference for local control. He thought there was a general belief amongst most legislators that it was the way to go on a variety of levels, not limited to education. He was the former principal at a charter school and there were two charter schools in his community that worked well. He explained that both of the charter schools had gone through the approval process and were longstanding with an important role in the overall education programs provided in Ketchikan. He considered what could be done at the state level to advance reform or improvement in outcomes. He asked if teacher retention, particularly in rural areas would be a considerable help to outcomes. He shared that he had gotten better at his job as a teacher as time went on. He discussed the importance of building relationships with students and their families. Senator Tobin responded affirmatively. The Senate Education Committee had heard an outcry from many teachers asking for a defined benefit. Teachers had shared that they could move to the State of Washington and make $30,000 more and have a pension. She stated there was something to be said that teachers were willing to take a $30,000 pay cut and remain in Alaska if they had a pension. She referenced a document in members' packets titled "How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence from Project Star" (copy on file). She relayed that Project Star enumerated 11,571 students in Tennessee to determine how to improve education outcomes. The first determination was that small class sizes were significantly more likely to lead to attendance in college and exhibit improvements in other outcomes. The second finding was that students with a more experienced teacher in kindergarten had higher earnings. She stated that educator experience led to improved student outcomes. She shared that she is a Ph.D. student researching teacher quality and experience and its relationship to student outcomes. She relayed that there was a correlational and causal relationship. She elaborated that an educator with five to seven years in the classroom led to improved student outcomes by several points on any standardized assessment. 8:43:37 AM Representative Hannan stated that her concerns with the Alaska Reads Act pertained ensuring there were adequate funding resources for its implementation in addition to the data to track it. She noted that the legislature looked at the collective data of kids across the state. She provided st an example of a child who did not read at grade level in 1 grade and then moved four different school districts over the next two years. She noted that the data was confidential on an individual basis. She asked if there was place in the data collection that DEED could have mechanisms to help school districts know of any interventions a student may have from a prior district when they switch to a new school halfway through a school year. She noted that the school the student was moving to partway through the year would not receive any BSA funding for the student because their former school would have received it. She stated there was so much confidentiality that when an individual kid's needs were identified by one school the information did not follow them when moving schools (e.g., a second grade teacher knew a student missed half their first grade year, but then the student moved schools). She asked what it would take to include that type of information in the data available to drive policy. She was not suggesting a truant officer in every district improved attendance, but when kids were not in class or moved repeatedly it resulted in learning deficits. Senator Tobin answered that there was very comprehensive data reporting in the Alaska Reads Act; however, because the legislation did not have the resources it needed, educators across the state were struggling to get the information to DEED. She stated that a significant increase to the BSA would help fund additional support staff that would be able to collect the data and provide it to DEED. She believed a critical component of the Alaska Reads Act was an annual convening of educators, experts, and early education advocates to help the legislature understand where there were holes and where there could be future iterative designs made to the Alaska Reads Act. Unfortunately, the panel was defunded the previous year. There were resources included in the FY 25 budget to convene the panel electronically. Information from the panel would enable the legislature to make changes to the legislation that were locally informed that would provide for statewide reform. She shared that the Colorado Reads Act had gone through five iteratives and she believed the Alaska Reads Act would follow a similar path as the state continued to realize where gaps existed. She believed there were gaps in how the state tracked student performance from district to district and as families moved. She thought it was one area where the legislature could do some real work to help get resources into schools and resources in the DEED to track. Senator Tobin provided closing comments on the bill. She shared that she had been thinking about the concept of accountability. She detailed that the legislature heard frequently from individuals that more accountability was needed in Alaska's public schools. One of the tools of accountability was assessments. She noted that when there was trauma in a community, disruptions to the learning environment (e.g., a pandemic), and things happening in a student's home life, students would not do well on a single point in time assessment. She stated that other tools were needed to help understand whether students were learning what they were meant to learn. Additionally, the state needed to ensure that students were tracked because the goal was to get them out into the workforce and into the places they could make a difference in the world. She believed the provisions to opt out of state assessments could be shifted. She detailed that students in brick and mortar schools took the statewide assessments (about 86 percent of those students took the assessments). She noted that the number of students taking the assessments in the state's public correspondence programs and charter schools was about 19 percent. She explained that the state did not know how its correspondence and charter school students were doing because it did not have the data from assessments as one available tool. She noted that a bill would be introduced on the Senate floor that day, which would remove a parent's ability to opt out of assessments. Co-Chair Foster thanked Senator Tobin and Mr. Mason. SB 52 was HEARD and HELD in committee for further consideration.