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Lawmakers are talking about adding money to K-12 education this year, but it's unclear how much and in what form, and therefore how much school districts will get.

Last week, Sen. Lyman Hoffman of Bethel talked about giving schools about $20 million as fuel grants. In 2007 (the last audited year), school districts spent about $62 million on fuel -- Hoffman figured the state could pick up a third of it. The money would be distributed based on actual spending on fuel, so bigger districts would get more dollars, but districts where fuel was a higher percent of the overall budget would fare relatively better.

Sen. Gary Wilken of Fairbanks pitched a different idea yesterday on the Senate floor -- bring back the school improvement grants that were doled out last year but dropped this year, also worth $20 million.

Each of the proposals can be compared to tacking another $100 onto the base student allocation, something Wilken, Gov. Sarah Palin, and others pushed for. That would have put another $22 million into K-12.

All three proposals affect different districts differently. Basically, the school improvement grants would be best for urban districts, followed by the BSA increase and then the fuel grants. Rural districts would benefit most from the fuel grants, then the BSA boost, then the improvement grants. (Implementing the ISER study for district cost factors, which accounts for higher fuel costs, is part of the new K-12 funding package, but it doesn't kick in for the next few years.)

There seems to be some disagreement on the issue among members of the Senate majority. At a news conference today, Senate President Lyda Green of Wasilla said they would probably dole out money on a per-student basis, as the BSA or improvement grants would. Sen. Bert Stedman of Sitka chimed in that they were still considering different proposals.

There's also another idea out there. Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux of Kodiak is sponsoring a bill that would cover 50 percent of districts’ fuel costs for 2007 to 2009 -- a more generous version of Hoffman's proposal. The bill has a hearing Thursday.

One key aspect of the proposals being considered now is that they would all be one-time deals, whereas the increase in the BSA would have given more money this year and every year after. The new K-12 funding package is stairstepped, with increases to the BSA of $100 for each of the next three years. But if lawmakers provide “one-time” grants worth the same as a $100 increase this year, school districts won’t see any increase next year, which means they’ll probably push for another “one-time” grant.

The subtext here is that Gov. Palin may have been right. She wanted to be fairly generous this year (on the scale of the various proposals), and argued that was the only way to get beyond the debate over funding and move into the debate over how best to teach Alaska's children. Lawmakers went with the cheaper version, and now school districts are saying they don’t have enough money and lawmakers are debating how to get it to them. School districts still don’t know how to write their budgets, and school funding risks once again becoming part of the end of the session deal-making.