Around 100 people, many wearing red, flooded the sidewalks of Petersburg’s downtown on April 24. They were marching in support of increased state funding for education.
Bipartisan education legislation that would have increased the state’s per-student funding formula by $680 was vetoed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy last month. A veto override failed by one vote. An operating budget with $175 million in one-time education funding has passed the House and seems to have support in the Senate. The one-time funding is equivalent to a $680 per-student increase. Dunleavy can line-item veto some or all of that funding.
Petersburg’s protest event was part of a state-wide day of action organized by the Alaska branch of the National Education Association, a union of more than ten thousand public education employees statewide. People in more than a dozen other communities around Alaska participated in protest events, all of which took place outside of school hours so that student learning would not be disrupted.
KFSK’s Hannah Flor caught up with the downtown crowd.
The “Eleanor” at the beginning is Eleanor Kandoll, a junior at Petersburg High School. As a note of disclosure, both Eleanor Kandoll and Cindi Lagoudakis are volunteer DJs at KFSK.
