By SUZANNE DOWNING
April 20, 2026 – The Anchorage School District plans to lay off 56 teachers ahead of the next school year, a move the superintendent  says is driven by tightening finances after voters rejected key funding measures earlier this month.
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The layoffs represent about 2% of the district’s roughly 2,800 teachers, which are typically measured in full-time equivalent positions to account for part-time roles. In addition to those layoffs, approximately 203 teachers will be reassigned to different schools or positions as the district reshuffles staffing to absorb the cuts. Anchorage is losing students and schools are also on the chopping block as a result. Students are leaving the Anchorage School District,  with enrollment dropping by roughly 7,000–7,500 students since 2010 (shrinking from about 49,000 to around 42,000-43,000 currently).Â
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Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said the teacher reductions are necessary following the failure of Proposition 9, a special levy that was expected to tax property owners another $12 million to help retain more than 80 teaching positions. Voters also rejected Proposition 1, a bond measure supposedly to fund school safety and security upgrades.
Bryantt said the district will operate with fewer teaching positions next year, which he said will lead to larger class sizes across grade levels and, particularly in high schools, fewer elective course offerings. District-wide student-teacher ratio is approximately 18 to 1.
The district is also eliminating roughly 500 positions overall this year through a combination of layoffs, attrition, and cuts to support staff, underscoring the scale of the financial challenges.
Bryantt struck a measured tone in addressing the outcome, acknowledging both disappointment and voter concerns.
“For some, this result is disappointing… For others, this vote reflects genuine concerns about affordability, trust, and how the district operates,” he wrote in a message to the community.
The narrow failure of the levy has compounded existing budget pressures. Even after making some reductions for the upcoming fiscal year, the district is projecting a deficit exceeding $40 million by FY2028 and more than $30 million by FY2029. Rising costs driven by union salaries, health care, and utilities continue and declining enrollments contribute to the structural imbalance.
Bryantt said uncertainty over future state education funding further complicates long-term planning. In previous years, the district has been able to rehire laid-off teachers after increases in state funding, but he said it is too early to know whether that will be possible this time.
The defeat of Proposition 1 also means that planned safety and security upgrades at school facilities will be delayed.
Beyond the immediate staffing impacts, Bryantt emphasized that the district is still trying to understand why voters rejected the measures and plans to launch a broader community engagement effort.
“It would be a mistake to assume we fully understand the reasons without listening more deeply,” he wrote, adding that rebuilding trust will require more than words and may involve changes in how the district operates and allocates resources.
Bryantt said he hopes to establish a more structured system for community input once the new school board is seated in May, as the district looks to regain public support for future funding efforts.
21 thoughts on “Fifty-six teaching positions to be cut in Anchorage, as superintendent lays out plans for downsizing after funding rejected by voters”
The Superintendent is gaslighting. If the Board and District had understood that the voters did not want to rebuild Inlet View school at a cost of many millions of dollars, both of the propositions would have passed. Listening only to the fashionable and connected, the Board and District rebuilt it anyway. This was conduct bordering on the criminal. Have a nice day, ASD.
The citizens lost our respect for the school system when they decided to go out and get them a DEI hire for superintendent at the time he was hired. He didn’t even meet minimum qualifications, but he was hired anyway.
Queen Constant will react next. He is always even more enflamed when Bryantt is involved in anything. Rainbow Rage!
And that is just a small part of the list of the many restructuring and budget cuts needing to be reduced or eliminated.
This doesn’t even put a dent in the system yet. Believe it or not.
Do you why Red states are booming with children? BECAUSE their adults don’t live in a death culture like Alaska adults live in. We don’t celebrate life at conception, and we don’t raise our children who have siblings to honor their younger siblings and babies for them tk want to be parents one day, and we don’t celebrate life at every age including teens parents, single parents, and the Old parents over forty and fifty having children.
Beside Alaska school districts give out shotty education.and more parents are seeking better educators and education paths for their children here, there also is a birth decline adding more stress that there are not more babies to be added into the school district to make up for the children leaving. Red states whose adults value life and have made abortion illegal in their states, their families and school districts are booming with children while states like Alaska who have a death culture and allow abortion they are seeing declining birth rates.
But will these Alaska community leaders put one n one together? I have never met a stupid adult who could put on n one together.
We give, we give, we give. It’s never enough. The base student allocation last year was huge! And yet, the hand is out again this year. I’m tired of giving the ASD money, They don’t deliver results.
BSA wasn’t huge.
I’m certain you don’t know what ASD’s academic outcomes are.
From the Alaska department of education:
ASD 2024-2025 STAR Testing
All grades English/Language Arts proficient/advanced 35.60%, Math proficient/ advanced 35.34%.
It means over 60% of students do not meet the proficiency in either subject!
So keep cutting funding and teachers and deferred maintenance til class sizes are forty students and then you can continue to claim public schools don’t work but publicly funded, restricted eligibility christian schools will save the day.
Y’all need a broader more inclusive world view. You’re squeezing us to poverty.
Base student allocation increase last year was huge! Y’all need to “Lear” to read the entire comment before inserting yer foot.
> You’re squeezing us to poverty.
Good. You are surplus to requirements and a determent to our society. One day there will be none of you.
Absolutely Correct … It’s never enough and they’ll continue to return year-over-year with hand out demanding more while delivering sub-standard // unacceptable outcomes. It’s very emblematic of an unsufferable // ungrateful wife … soon to be x-wife!
Two Solutions:
… Divorce from Anchorage.
… Home School (recommend banding together with likeminded parents and hire appropriate instructors).
All: Note that the teacher reductions were “positions” not actual teachers. Very important. Bureaucrats use the words “positions” and “jobs” interchangeably. And why are teachers so angry at having to be reassigned to another different school? Military kids constantly change schools, some every 2 years.
Well, gee, if you can cut that many teachers, just imagine how many non-teaching positions you can cut! Why, we might even have an efficient workforce going forward without all the waste and fat in the budget?
Who am I kidding? None of the folks who determine the workforce for the school district can add, let alone subtract. They all learned in their own school systems, naturally.
Superintendent gaslighting the sky is falling, the world is coming to an end and we are all going to die to get what he wants. Retaliation for not passing the education who cares about you and your children yearly we need more funding.
18 students per classroom x 20,000 = 360,000 – teachers’ salaries= where is the rest of the money going?
Less students, schools half full, students not attending, low proficiency rates, etc., They should be cutting
funding and positions, including the
vacant positions, but start with the overhead ones, especially the unqualified superintendent and just buy rubber stamps to represent the school board.
When I went to school, the student/teacher ratio was a lot higher as was the proficiency rate. And no, you don’t have a lot more to teach now, because you are not even teaching it. You are just teaching how to complain give us more money,
I wonder how many actual administrative positions they cut. I don’t mean administrative “staff”. I mean actual administrative positions. The vast majority of school administrators are utterly useless and grossly overpaid, fighting tooth and nail to keep handing themselves hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars while contributing virtually nothing to the education of kids.
Its the Washington Monument Strategy. Look that up. You cut the popular things( like teachers) to hold them for ransom to get the public to pay for your spending sprees.
Isn’t this the typical spring “scare tactic” we see every year? Soon we will hear that money was found in some clerical error and all will be great. We have heard this song and dance almost every spring. Get rid of the admin positions first. Why is it always the teachers? Teachers are the easiest threat. My high school had an assistant principal and one school secretary. The elective “office” was offered so students did the menial tasks which was a great learning tool for students. My senior year, I was in charge of attendance for a school of approx 600 – 700 students but also answered phones and other office duties.
The district is trying to understand? Maybe I can help. ASD gets as much of the city budget as ALL other departments combined. Taxes rise, cost of living becomes more and more challenging, and the city keeps finding new ways to take more dollars. ASD gets additional money over and over again and yet it’s never enough. Nonetheless, results continue to underwhelm. On top of all that, they work to indoctrinate future voters in their lefty worldviews. Let the liberals donate THEIR full PFDs and funds to the type of education they care so much about. Don’t they have enough of their own dollars to float their beloved system? Why do they feel the need to force the rest of us to finance it for them? I say reduce the size of government, return the savings to residents, and let individuals fund what they believe matters.
Good. Every time a government school instructor loses their job it is a win for our society.
Be careful about the semantical twist of positions versus actual employees. An authorized position of employment is just that and nothing more. It is not necessarily an employee. When a political organization like the ASD reports it has eliminated positions the appropriate follow-up question is how many fewer employees does that mean? So, how many fewer employees are on the ASD payroll as a result of the rejected funding votes?
You know, if they came to me once in a blue moon and told me “we need to fix the roof of school X” I would gladly vote yes on that bond. Unfortunately ASD comes every year (along with the Muni for fire trucks, police cars, drainage projects etc.) and asks me to approve a loan (bond), while our kids can’t read or do math.
The real deterrent for me to vote for any more bonds, is the little caveat that all funds are in essence going into the general fund, bonds ARE NOT tied to that particular project and to my knowledge excess funds are not required to be returned to the taxpayer or pay down the debt. To my knowledge, there is considerable outstanding bond debt for bonds approved but not yet issued.
This slush fund has to end. Until bond funds are irrevocably tied to the project listed in the proposal and the project requires completion in a specific time frame, we the taxpayers should not approve another bond. We should also not bond for a police vehicle or fire truck that lasts maybe 10-20 years with a 30 year bond. The Muni should budget for these purchases like every other household in town. I bet we are still paying for equipment the Muni bought in the 1990’s and has been retired many years ago. We do not have a fiscal cliff, we have administrations with little restraint in the “nice to have” spending department and an inability to budget.