Kuspuk - EdTribune AK - Alaska Education Data

Fairbanks Closed Three Schools. It Was Not Enough.

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Christine Fik's children attended Pearl Creek Elementary, a school their family considered a community, not just a building. In February 2025, the Fairbanks North Star Borough^↗ school board voted 5-2 to close Pearl Creek along with Midnight Sun Elementary and Two Rivers Elementary. Fik told a local reporter her kids "feel like they are the last puffins, like they're going extinct."

The closures were supposed to help close a $16 million budget deficit. They did. And the district is still shrinking.

Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, Alaska's second largest, enrolled 11,122 students in 2025-26. That is 2,017 fewer than the 13,139 it enrolled in 2019-20, a 15.4% decline in seven years, six times the statewide rate. It is the lowest enrollment in the dataset. And the 2025-26 drop of 585 students was the district's second-largest annual loss, trailing only the 1,940-student COVID crash in 2020-21.

The Recovery That Wasn't

The raw trend line is not a straight descent. Fairbanks lost nearly 15% of its enrollment in a single year during COVID, then clawed back 1,000 students in 2021-22 and another 369 in 2022-23, reaching 12,568. For two years, it looked like the district might stabilize.

It did not. Enrollment dropped 203 in 2023-24, then 658 in 2024-25, then 585 in 2025-26. The three-year slide erased the entire post-COVID recovery and pushed enrollment 1,446 below its pre-recovery peak.

The pattern matters because it reframes the district's fiscal planning. School administrators who budgeted around a stabilizing enrollment of 12,000-plus are now operating a district of 11,122 with infrastructure built for 13,000. The October 2025 head count came in 189 students below the district's own September projection, costing an estimated $2.72 million in anticipated state funding.

One District, 62% of Alaska's Enrollment Loss

Fairbanks accounts for 61.6% of Alaska's total enrollment decline since 2019-20, despite enrolling less than 9% of the state's students. The state lost 3,272 students over that span. Fairbanks alone lost 2,017.

Among Alaska's five largest traditional districts, Fairbanks has fallen the furthest in percentage terms. Anchorage^↗ is down 10.0%. Juneau^↗ dropped 16.5%, a steeper rate but on a much smaller base of 4,562 students. Kenai Peninsula^↗ has held relatively steady, losing 4.8%. Mat-Su^↗, the only large traditional district to grow, is up 3.3% since its first full year in the dataset.

Fairbanks's share of state enrollment slipped from 10.2% in 2019-20 to 8.9% in 2025-26. That 1.3-percentage-point drop translates to a significant revenue loss. At the current Base Student Allocation of $6,660 per student, 2,017 fewer students represents roughly $13.4 million in forgone annual formula funding before district cost factors and other adjustments.

Who Is Leaving

The decline reaches across every racial and ethnic group except Pacific Islanders, who gained 22 students. White students account for the largest absolute loss: 1,592 fewer since 2019-20, a 20.8% drop. Black enrollment fell 39.6%, the steepest rate of any group, though on a small base of 548 to 331 students. Multiracial students declined 10.9%, Native American students 8.3%, Hispanic students 5.0%, and Asian students 11.0%.

The breadth of the decline across demographic groups suggests a structural driver, not a shift within the population. Families are not choosing different schools within Fairbanks. They are leaving.

The district's own analysis confirms this. Senior Research Analyst Ellis M. Ott found that more than half of the students who left in 2025-26 did so because their families moved out of Alaska entirely. In grades K-8, 77% of departing students had families who left the borough, and the majority of those left the state. Another 165 students transferred to correspondence programs outside the district, part of a statewide shift toward virtual and home-based instruction. Statewide, correspondence programs now enroll more than 16,000 Alaska students, and districts like Galena^↗, home to the IDEA correspondence program, have grown 60.6% in seven years while traditional districts shrink.

The Military Variable

Fort Wainwright and Eielson Air Force Base anchor the borough's economy and demographics. Military families cycle through on deployment rotations, making enrollment inherently volatile. The arrival of F-35 fighter jets at Eielson brought approximately 3,500 active-duty airmen and dependents to the area in the late 2010s, a demographic boost that state demographer David Howell noted has since been outweighed by broader outmigration patterns.

The military connection creates a structural instability that civilian communities do not face. A single redeployment order can move hundreds of families. But the current decline is not solely a military story. The borough's civilian population is also shrinking. Alaska's Department of Labor projects the Fairbanks North Star Borough will fall from about 96,000 residents to 88,800 by 2050, a 7.5% decline, driven by net outmigration that has exceeded natural growth for over a decade.

"Losses due to net migration have outweighed their growth from natural increase." — State Demographer David Howell, KTVF, July 2024

One competing explanation: a housing shortage. The borough needs an estimated 4,000 additional housing units. Families who might otherwise stay cannot find housing they can afford, creating a paradox where a shrinking population coexists with unmet housing demand. The school district loses students either way.

The Pipeline Under the Pipeline

Kindergarten enrollment tells the longer story. Fairbanks enrolled 1,093 kindergartners in 2019-20. In 2025-26, it enrolled 750, a 31.4% drop. That is not a COVID artifact. The number peaked at 1,057 in 2022-23 during the partial recovery, then fell every year since.

The grade-level data shows losses across the board. First grade lost 244 students (22.5%). Sixth grade lost 201 (18.4%). Every grade from PK through 11th declined. The only grade that grew was 12th, which added 44 students, likely reflecting retained or returning students rather than new arrivals.

At the school level, the losses are concentrated in the two traditional high schools. West Valley High lost 229 students (23.2%) and Lathrop High lost 216 (22.7%). Meanwhile, Fairbanks B.E.S.T., an alternative education program, grew from 274 to 891 students, a 225% increase that suggests families are seeking nontraditional options within the district even as they leave it.

A Lawsuit and a Budget

In January 2026, the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District and Kuspuk^↗ School District filed an adequacy lawsuit against the state, arguing that Alaska "funds education based on what they can afford, not what it actually costs." The districts are seeking a court-ordered study to determine what it actually costs to educate an Alaska student, plus an annual inflation adjustment.

The lawsuit cites more than $400 million in deferred maintenance across the Fairbanks district and argues the state has funded schools at levels "woefully inadequate and have no reasonable or logical connection to the actual cost" of education. The three schools closed in 2025 were projected to save roughly $10 million combined with outsourced custodial services, against a $16 million gap. Even after absorbing those cuts, Chief Operations Officer Andy DeGraw told KUAC the district could face up to a $5 million deficit for 2026-27.

"If things line up in our favor, we could have a very small to no deficit. If things don't fall in our favor, it could be as high as $5 million." — Andy DeGraw, Chief Operations Officer, KUAC, Oct. 2025

The district has now closed seven schools in five years and eliminated 300 staff positions. At some point, consolidation runs out of buildings to close. The question is whether the enrollment line flattens before the options do.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Half of Alaska's Districts Hit Record Lows

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In Sleetmute, a village of 80 people on the Kuskokwim River, an architect declared the school building unsafe for occupancy in 2021. The foundation had deteriorated to rubble. The Kuspuk^↗ School District had been requesting roof repairs since 2005. The estimated cost rose from $411,000 to $1.6 million over 17 years of waiting. Half the building is now closed.

Kuspuk is one of 29 Alaska school districts currently at their lowest enrollment ever recorded. The district enrolled 272 students in 2025-26, down 26.1% from its peak of 368. It is not alone. Half of Alaska's districts are now at record lows, and the list includes the state's largest: Anchorage^↗ at 40,688, Fairbanks North Star^↗ at 11,122, Juneau^↗ at 3,809, and Lower Kuskokwim^↗ at 3,666.

The districts at their smallest enrollment hold 75,676 students, 60.4% of Alaska's total. More than half the state's public school students attend a district that has never been smaller.

Ten districts fell to new lows this year

The 2026 count did not just confirm existing declines. It created new ones. Ten districts dropped to all-time lows for the first time this year, including Anchorage and Fairbanks, the state's two largest traditional districts.

Anchorage fell to 40,688 students, 10.0% below its seven-year peak of 45,218. That decline, 4,530 students, exceeds the entire state's net loss of 3,272 over the same period. Fairbanks dropped to 11,122, down 15.4% from its 2020 level of 13,139. In February 2025, the Fairbanks school board voted to close three elementary schools: Midnight Sun, Pearl Creek, and Two Rivers. Students in Two Rivers now bus over 30 miles into Fairbanks.

The smaller districts on the newly-at-low list paint a geography of retreat. Craig^↗ on Prince of Wales Island: 550 students, down 37.1% from 874. Valdez: 527, down 23.2%. Hoonah: 104, down 17.5%. Hydaburg^↗, a Haida village of 300 people on the southern tip of Prince of Wales Island, enrolled 62 students, down 63.3% from 169.

The other half

A handful of districts are at all-time highs, but the composition tells its own story.

Matanuska-Susitna Borough^↗, the only large traditional district growing, enrolled 19,903 students in its post-2024 configuration. Mat-Su Borough surpassed 100,000 residents in 2024, growing at 3.4% annually while the state grew at 1.2%. It is the release valve for Anchorage families priced out or pushed out. But even Mat-Su's superintendent, Randy Trani, told Alaska Public Media that the district faces a $22.5 million budget shortfall, and is planning three school closures of its own.

"$700,000 in a budget of more than a quarter of a billion is essentially flat funding, and flat funding is a cut." — Randy Trani, Mat-Su Superintendent, Alaska Public Media, March 2026

Nenana City School District, home to the CyberLynx correspondence program, hit a record 2,231 students, up 58.1% since 2020. Several small traditional districts, including Delta/Greely (1,007), Petersburg (473), and Kake (112), also reached highs. These are genuine bright spots, though all three combined hold fewer students than Anchorage lost in a single year.

What is driving this

The most direct driver is demographic. Alaska is in its 13th consecutive year of negative net migration, the longest such streak since 1945. Between 2024 and 2025, 1,740 more people left the state than arrived. The school-age population is shrinking while the over-65 population grew 3.2% in a single year. The child population (birth to 17) shrank 0.8% in a single year.

The strain is concentrated in Southeast Alaska, where population is projected to drop 17% by 2050, a loss equal to the populations of Sitka and Wrangell combined. Housing costs are the primary barrier. "The price of a home and the cost of being here is just too much of a challenge" for young families, Southeast Conference economic development leader Brian Holst told KTOO. In Juneau, the over-60 population now outnumbers those under 20.

A second factor is student migration within the state. Approximately 10,000 students have shifted from neighborhood schools to correspondence programs, funding that follows them out of traditional districts. This transfer does not reduce statewide enrollment, but it hollows out the brick-and-mortar system: Fairbanks board member Brandy Harty told Alaska Public Media that "the problem isn't at our school board, it's in Juneau, with funding."

Record lows in every size category

The pattern is not confined to small rural districts or large urban ones. Record lows appear across every size category. Nine of 14 mid-sized districts (1,000 to 4,999 students) are at their lowest ever, a 64.3% rate higher than any other size bucket. The list includes Ketchikan Gateway^↗ (1,871, down 14.9%), North Slope Borough^↗ (1,610, down 17.5%), and Northwest Arctic Borough (1,756, down 10.0%).

Thirty-two of Alaska's districts enroll fewer than 500 students. Eight enroll fewer than 100. These micro-districts face an arithmetic that larger systems do not: losing 15 students can mean losing a teacher, a program, or a building. Kuspuk illustrates the bind. The district relies entirely on state funding as a Regional Education Attendance Area with no local tax base. Its superintendent, Madeline Aguillard, told NPR the district spent over $200,000 since 2021 just strengthening capital funding applications, plus tens of thousands more on a lobbyist, to compete for repairs that never came.

"These bright young children show up every morning to go to school in a building that's not fit for even anything but being ready to be demolished." — House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, NPR, March 2025

The lawsuit and the ledger

In January 2026, Fairbanks North Star and Kuspuk filed suit against the state, alleging that Alaska has failed to meet its constitutional obligation to provide adequate public education funding. The Base Student Allocation, Alaska's primary per-pupil funding mechanism, has increased just 2.2% since 2015 while inflation rose 37% over the same period. Last year's celebrated $700 increase actually netted only $20 more per student than the one-time funding districts received the year before.

Nearly 80% of Alaska school districts are facing deficits, according to an Alaska Council of School Administrators survey. Anchorage is cutting 389 positions to close a $90 million gap. Fairbanks has closed seven schools in five years. Kodiak needs $1 million in cuts. Mat-Su is planning three closures despite being the only large district adding students.

Enrollment decline and underfunding are separate problems, but they compound. A district losing students loses per-pupil revenue, but fixed costs for heating, maintenance, and transportation do not shrink proportionally. In rural Alaska, where buildings serve as community centers, storm shelters, and the only indoor gathering space for miles, closing a school has consequences the funding formula does not measure.

Alaska's state enrollment stands at 125,317, down 2.5% from its 2020 peak of 128,589. The state DEED projects another 1,500-student decline next year. The question is how many of the districts still above their record lows will join the other half.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.