Anchorage School District finance committee hears $77 million shortfall; members weigh closures and four‑day week

The Anchorage School District Board Finance Committee met Dec. 18 for a budget update that staff said begins from a roughly $77,000,000 projected general‑fund shortfall for FY27 and will require significant spending reductions or other revenue steps to balance next year’s budget.

At the meeting, staff walked the committee through the district’s contracted‑services line — described in the presentation as “a little over $60,000,000” — and the major components that comprise it: legal fees, utilities (electric and heat called out as the largest shares), student travel and stipends, building custodial and maintenance contracts, instructional contracted services (audits, demographers, interpreters) and technology maintenance agreements. The presenter said one instructional contracted‑services object code alone is “a little over $9,000,000,” and that correspondence allotments account for about $4,000,000 of that amount.

The district’s chief information officer, Mike Blakenstein, told the committee the technology and security portion of the contracts includes roughly 137 software packages and rising security and data‑center costs. “We have millions of attempts per day to get into our systems,” Blakenstein said, adding that the district stores backups across multiple global data centers so data can be restored if systems are compromised.

Staff also flagged…