The Sitka School District will receive close to $1 million in additional revenue for the remainder of this fiscal year. At the Sitka School Board meeting on Wednesday (2-4-26), Superintendent Deidre Jenson said because of conservative student enrollment estimates for FY26, the school will likely receive more money from the Alaska Department of Education than they budgeted for. Jenson said that money will go right into savings.
“It just goes into our fund balance, basically, really, that’s kind of the whole point of that,” Jenson said. “We’re not building it into our budget for a budget revision. We’re just going to put it in our reserves, and we have to spend less of our fund balance than we had thought we were going to spend this year.”
While the district’s enrollment is up slightly from last year, student representative Francis Myers wondered how the enrollment increase had equated to such a large sum.
We’re increasing the revenue in this next budget by close to a million dollars because of a conservative estimated average daily membership,” he said, referencing Jenson’s report. “What does that mean, exactly? Because that’s, like, 173 students.”
Jenson clarified that the increase didn’t just include an uptick in the number of students, but also accounted for the number of “intensive students” — those are students who receive special education services— that the district serves and receives more funding support for.
Jenson said they did need to adjust the budget to account for about a $60,000 reduction to Impact Aid funding [web: that’s federal funding that reimburses school districts for property tax revenue from tax-exempt federal property]. But Jenson said the budget for Fiscal Year ‘26 remained in a good place, and school spending is on track.
“I spoke to admins this week and let them know you guys are doing a good job,” Jenson said. “If we don’t have to put a spending freeze on, that’d be great. But we are…the admin are being conservative in their spending. So we’re all kind of trying to watch our P’s and Q’s.”
The school board unanimously approved the budget revisions for this fiscal year.
Tonight the school board will meet with the Sitka Assembly to review the school budget for next fiscal year and the board will make its annual ask for city funding. That’s 6 p.m. tonight at Harrigan Centennial Hall.
