by Emily Schwing, KYUK

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK Public Media and NPR’s Station Investigations Team. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon toured the public school in Sleetmute last fall, he called the building “the poster child” for what’s wrong with the way the state pays to build and maintain schools. The tiny community 240 miles west of Anchorage had begged Alaska’s education department for nearly two decades for money to repair a leaky roof that over time had left part of the school on the verge of collapse.

Seated at a cafeteria table after the tour, Edgmon, a veteran independent lawmaker, told a Yup’ik elder he planned to “start raising a little bit of Cain” when he returned to the Capitol in Juneau for the 2025 legislative session.

Other lawmakers said similar things after an investigation by KYUK Public Media, ProPublica and NPR earlier this year found that the state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings, including the Sleetmute school. Because of the funding failures, students and teachers in some of Alaska’s most remote villages face serious health and safety risks, the news organizations found.

Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, an Anchorage Democrat, called the investigation’s findings “heartbreaking” and said in an email during the legislative session earlier this year that “the current state of these schools is unacceptable.” Sen. Scott Kawasaki, a Fairbanks Democrat, wrote to say that the “responsibility lies squarely on the legislature” and acknowledged “we do not do enough.” Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican from Fairbanks, wrote, “We are working to right the ship!”

Yet during a legislative session where money for education was front and center, lawmakers were only able to pass $40 million in school construction and maintenance funding, about 5% of the nearly $800 million that districts say they need to keep their buildings safe and operating.

In June, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed more than two-thirds of that, nearly $28 million.

“Basically, we don’t have enough money to pay for all of our obligations,” Dunleavy explained in a video posted on YouTube.

In the video, seated at an empty table in a darkened room and flanked by U.S. and Alaska flags, Dunleavy, a Republican, painted a grim picture of the state’s future. “The price of oil has gone down; therefore our revenue is going down,” he said.

The crisis Dunleavy described isn’t just a short-term problem. State officials have known for decades that relying on oil to fund the budget is........

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