Alaska senators questioned whether the state's school construction funding system unfairly favors wealthy districts that can hire professionals to create high-quality applications while poorer communities wait years for basic repairs.

The concerns emerged Tuesday during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the Bond Reimbursement and Grant Review Committee, which ranks school construction and major maintenance projects statewide. Committee members pointed to Galena School District, which jumped to second place on the funding list with a $36 million project despite other schools waiting a decade for repairs.

"This really disadvantages the other schools that do not have those financial ability," said Senator Bert Stedman, committee co-chair. "There is no way they could get up to the top of the ladder."

Senator Bill Kaufman echoed those concerns, describing how affluent communities can "pre-fund their major maintenance and then submit to the grant list automatically get ranked very high because the project is done or near done and paid for." Meanwhile, poorer communities "do not have the financial capacity to go in and fix some of the issues in their schools and resubmit."

Heather Heineken, director of finance and support services with the Department of Education and Early Development, acknowledged the problem. "We are working on that," she said. "We are trying to identify something that can help us know the capacity of different districts."

The nine-member committee, established by state law in 1993, reviews applications from school districts and creates ranked lists for construction and major maintenance funding. Districts submit detailed applications that are scored on criteria including facility condition, life safety concerns, and project readiness.

But the current system rewards districts that can afford to hire architects and engineers to develop complete project designs, committee members said. Galena's $36 million project exemplifies this advantage. The district "sat on an application, made sure they had the application done right, and then put all their effort" into securing top ranking, according to Brandon Anania, a committee member from Cusbac School District.

The funding disparity has real consequences for rural Alaska schools. Some projects have remained on maintenance lists for years without funding, senators said. Stedman requested data showing how long individual projects have been waiting, noting "some projects have been on for a decade or even longer possibly."

This year's ranked list highlights the problem. Three projects — Galena at $36 million, Lower Kuskokwim at $55 million, and Fairbanks at $37 million — dominate funding that could address dozens of smaller maintenance needs across rural Alaska.

"It is abnormal in the list to be in the 20, 30, 40 million range," Stedman said. "Many, many, many smaller schools that are way down the list on a lot smaller amounts that they may be looking at, at a million, four hundred and four hundred thousand range, six hundred thousand range, three million range."

The department is proposing changes for the fiscal year 2028 application process to address these disparities. Officials plan to shift from using building age as a factor to actual facility condition assessments, increase emphasis on life safety concerns, and redistribute scoring points to help districts without resources to fully develop projects.

"We redistributed the points for the application to support districts that may not have the resources to fully develop projects to later design stages," Heineken said. "We lowered, we changed the standards a little bit to even out the playing field."

Kevin Lyon, a committee member from Kenai Borough School District, defended the current process as transparent but acknowledged challenges. "The hard part is working into every situation," he said. "Sometimes you get results that might not be what you expected and then we correct that the following year."

The committee also faces pressure from limited state funding. This year, the governor's budget funded only the top three projects on the major maintenance list, though the department was able to extend funding through project six using lapsed funds.

Committee members stressed that baseline funding levels make strategic application timing crucial for districts. "There is a very limited amount of money given out at the end of the year, and if an applicant is not at the top, their chances of recovering project costs are extremely limited," Anania said.

The department publishes ranked lists annually in March, with applications due in November. The complete six-year statewide facilities plan and current application lists are available online through the Department of Education and Early Development.

Senators indicated they will continue reviewing the funding process as they develop the state capital budget. The committee requested additional data on project wait times and district capacity to inform future funding decisions.