K-12 $6.6B budget request draft faces limits under spending cap

Alabama’s K-12 schools are still in the first month of the new school year, but state board of education members are already looking ahead to how much money they’ll need for the 2026-27 school year.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey shared a first draft of requests for fiscal year 2027 budget during the board’s retreat at American Village Wednesday morning.

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The draft — a $6.6 billion spending plan for Alabama’s K-12 schools, up $347 million from the FY26 budget — prioritizes early math instruction, support for struggling readers in grades four through eight, career technical expansion and school safety.

With growth in the Education Trust Fund capped at 5.75% for FY27, Mackey said he doesn’t expect to get everything the draft calls for. The statutory cap means no more than $10.4 billion, including about $570 million in new money, will be available across K-12, higher education and other education-related expenditures in the FY27 budget.

Mackey said the secondary spending cap, put in place by lawmakers in 2023, has changed how educators approach budgeting. In recent years, strong tax collections have left the state with recurring surpluses, which lawmakers then direct into a separate supplemental appropriation. Between 2021 and 2025, lawmakers allocated nearly $7 billion in supplemental tax revenue from the ETF.

“We created this permanent surplus,” Mackey said. “And then the surplus either goes into one of the three savings accounts or it gets put into a supplemental appropriation.”

“I think we’re in a place where we will permanently, always and forever have a supplemental budget in addition to what we call the direct budget,” he said.

District officials now think in terms of what they should include in their budget but also what might come in a supplemental appropriation — after tax receipts are finalized and appropriated  — halfway into the budget year. The most recent supplemental appropriation (from surplus 2024 tax year receipts) was $524 million, appropriated in April.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Trisha Powell Crain and originally published by Alabama Daily News.