Bob Griffin: Too much space, too few students and ASD’s costly imbalance

Mismanaging ASD’s fixed costs robs resources from classrooms

By BOB GRIFFIN

Feb. 5, 2026 – The current active Anchorage School District student enrollment from their Current Student Enrollment dashboard is 41,001 students as of Feb. 3. Of those students, 1,051 are Pre-K students and 4,331 are in homeschool, virtual or charter programs who are not attending neighborhood schools or alternative schools in and ASD facilities.

That brings the current enrollment of K-12 students in ASD neighborhood school building and alternative school buildings to just 35,619 students.  ASD projections indicate that student enrollment will decline by another 2,500 students in the next five years – and previous ASD projections have always underestimated how many students will leave.

February 2026 sets a new record for the fewest K-12 students attending ASD neighborhood schools in at least 47 years. In February 1979, there were 38,398 students in ASD neighborhood schools. I’ve been unable to find enrollment records prior the 1978-79 school year. To find the records back to 1978, I had to refer to the ASD 2010 Capital Improvement Plan. It’s no longer available on the ASD website, but luckily, I’ve saved a personal copy from research I conducted years ago.

After 2010, the district stopped publishing historical enrollment figures. It might have been because it became obvious enrollment was in rapid decline and the administration wanted to avoid highlighting that fact. Now, 15 years later, they’re finally acknowledging the trend to the public.

For those of you following along on with the math earlier, ASD has 2,779 fewer students today than 47 years ago. That’s roughly the equivalent capacity of seven 400-student elementary schools. And very likely to go much lower very soon.

The peak February enrollment for the ASD occurred in February, 2003 with 49,410. Approximately 47,700 were attending in neighborhood schools and alternative school buildings. Anticipating more growth, back the 1990s and 2000s, the district convinced voters to approve many new schools, resulting in the current facility inventory with a capacity for a little over 52,000 students, by state standards.

In the 1978-79 school year, ASD had 5.5 million square feet of school floorspace, and arguably better outcomes. Today, ASD has over 7.8 million square feet of floorspace with almost 3,000 fewer kids. The 2.3 million square feet in additional floorspace added by voters since 1978 is roughly equal to the floorspace of all eight ASD high schools.

School floorspace is expensive to heat, light and staff — and very expensive to maintain. Here’s the guidance from the ASD Capital Improvement Plan:

“Best practice within the facility management industry is to re-invest 4% of the Current Replacement Value (CRV) annually into capital projects. These projects can be broken down into three categories: Periodic Renewals (2%), As-Needed Alterations (1%) and Systematic Reduction of Deferred Requirements (1%)”.

Based on the most recent ASD project the replacement cost of design and construction of the 46,210 square foot Inlet View Elementary project, for $50,005,200, it’s fair to conclude that $1,082 per square foot is representative of the 2025 Current Replacement Value of our schools per square foot. That number continues to go up every year.

From that, we can conclude the taxpayer cost of maintaining our school buildings in the future will be 4% of $1,082/sf or $43.28 per square foot per year or $43.3m/year per million square feet of excess floorspace. And increasingly more expensive in follow-on years.

Too be clear: That maintenance cost figure outlined above does not include the cost of heating, lighting and the salaries and benefits non-teaching staff who are unique to each of our schools.

Here’s an actual example from the current ASD budget: Elementary School X is at 49% capacity and adopted a budget with 23 staff positions. Of those positions, 17 were classroom teachers and six employees were non-teachers unique to that school building. These non-teaching positions include the principal, clerical, technical, maintenance, custodial staff, etc.

The pay and benefits of non-classroom teacher positions make up about $400,000 of the $2.2 million staff budget for that school. That adds another $7 per square foot per year for operating that facility. If that school is consolidated with another school with low enrollment, the classroom teachers would be moved to fill vacant classrooms in other schools.

The next cost is the energy and utilities cost. For the School X example, their budgeted cost for energy and utilities runs another $181,000/year, about $3 per square foot per year.

All-in, surplus elementary floorspace runs about $50 per square foot per year to heat, light staff and maintain. That’s $50 million/year for every million square feet of excess floor space, or the equivalent to $100,000/year salaries for 500 employees. For secondary schools  the figures are pretty similar.

Right-sizing our district won’t be easy. People get personally and emotionally invested in their local neighborhood schools. That’s understandable. But mismanaging fixed costs by keeping excess buildings open robs resources from our kids’ education.

What we need to ask ourselves: Is the emotional attachment of keeping a particular school open more important than being able to refocus those resource savings into supporting our kids’ and teacher in the classrooms?

Bob Griffin is on the board of Alaska Policy Forum and served on the Alaska Board of Education and Early Development.