Local education employment varies: depends on population density in different regions.

• Author: Chepurko, Juliia
• Position: ALASKA TRENDS - Statistical data

One aspect of government that impacts the bottom line is education provided locally in communities across Alaska, because the state provides a large portion of funding to school districts. In general, local government is one of the largest employers in Alaska, and in many communities a significant portion of this sector is composed of persons employed in local education. However, the number of education employees per student varies significantly depending on the region.

We analyzed statewide data on the local education portion of local government employment using US Census Data available through IMPLAN software. We calculated the number of local government education employees per school age person (5 to 19 years old) for each region and compared those numbers to the statewide average of 0.2 education employees per school age person. According to this analysis, the Northern (0.33) and Southwest (0.32) regions have more employees per student than anywhere else in the state; Anchorage (0.04) and Mat-Su (0.9) have the least.

One of the reasons Anchorage and the Mat-Su have lower ratios of education employees to school age youth is because of larger classroom sizes and the shared overhead of a large district supporting many schools. For example, according to data from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development "School Enrollment by Grade as of October 1, 2014, FY2015," in Anchorage and Mat-Su the average number of students per school is about 463 (PreK-12 only is taken into account), while in Northern Southwest regions there are 152 and 112 students per school respectively. Statewide there are 18,729 employed in local government education and 153,424 school age persons, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

While there are more education employees per student than the statewide average in the Northern and Southwest regions, the populations in these communities, outside of the hubs with a few thousand people, generally number in the hundreds. The higher ratio of education employees per student is because it would be impractical for fewer staff to guide children of all ages through the broad variety of coursework that needs to be learned during K-12 studies as well as provide administrative and operational support to the individual schools and districts in the regions.

Alaska Trends, an outline of significant statewide statistics, is provided by the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development.

Indicator Units Period GENERAL Per Capita Personal US $ 2ndQ15 Income--Alaska Per Capita Personal US $ 2ndQ15 Income--United States Consumer Prices--Anchorage 1982-1984 = 100 lstH15 Consumer...