sixty teachers are back

and it took a last-minute check from Juneau to make it happen.

Back in February, the school board was staring down a ninety million dollar hole. To balance it, they let go of more than three hundred teaching jobs, and a lot of us wondered just how packed our kids' classrooms would get this fall.

Then lawmakers sent over about eleven and a half million dollars in one-time money. On Tuesday night, the board voted on where it goes, and the top priority was clear.

They're bringing back around sixty teaching positions, most of them classroom teachers, to ease the crowding at every grade level. They also funded five more school nurses, kept the riflery program, and held onto the district's deal with the Dome.

There's more on the table too. The district is piloting a new reading and writing curriculum for grades six through ten instead of buying it outright, which freed up dollars for even more teachers.

And this might not be the end of it. If oil prices stay high enough, Anchorage could see another thirty-two million from the state, with that call coming at the end of August. For now, a lot of classrooms just got a little less crowded.