At another rambling news conference on Wednesday, Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy floated several ideas to continue spending public money on religious private schools despite a court ruling that struck down the practice as unconstitutional.
While legislators across the political spectrum have responded with surprise to the news many families were using home school allotments — cash payments typically used to buy home school curricula and other supplies — to subsidize tuition at religious private schools, the governor and Attorney General Treg Taylor said it was working precisely as they wanted.
“Do I support the purchasing of coursework from private and religious outfits to underwrite the public education of kids? Yes,” he said. “Did I support vouchers going directly to private outfits? Yes. Why do I do that? Because I want to make sure that every kid in the state of Alaska has a quality education that meets their needs.”
In his ruling last week, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman (a Dunleavy appointee) wrote that there’s no way to square that spending with the Alaska Constitution’s prohibition on public money being spent on the direct benefit of religious or private schools. While Dunleavy and Taylor argue that it’s the families receiving the benefit, not the schools, Judge Zeman wrote the overarching scheme was not a trivial amount of money.
“Parents have the right to determine how their children are educated,” he wrote. “However, the framers of our constitution and the subsequent case law clearly indicate that public funds are not to be spent on private education.”
The extent to which people have been using these allotments to subsidize their religious private school education isn’t clear because the state doesn’t collect detailed spending data. However, it’s clear the ruling will impact the 24,000 students in Alaska’s home school system, regardless of whether they have been following the Alaska Constitution. Judge Zeman’s ruling found that the laws were so constitutionally flawed that broad swaths of the law were struck down.
“If the legislature believes these expenditures are necessary — then it is up to them to craft constitutional legislation to serve that purpose — that is not the court’s role,” he wrote.
Most legislators signaled interest in restoring the state’s home school laws to the pre-2014 status. That’s when Sen. Mike Dunleavy managed to sneak a provision into state law that erased much of the oversight over how these allotments could be spent, explicitly allowing the money to be spent on materials from private and religious schools. It was only more recently that public home school programs and religious private schools — with the blessing of Dunleavy’s Department of Law — began utilizing it to subsidize tuition.
But Dunleavy didn’t seem interested in closing the loophole he created.
Instead, he spent much of the news conference sowing seeds of fear about the entire future of the public home school program — with Taylor suggesting the ruling could prevent school districts from buying textbooks from private companies — calling for sweeping changes that would either change the Alaska Constitution or find other ways to skirt it.
The governor foreshadowed plans to appeal the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a costly and years-long process that would likely only be resolved after he’s term-limited out. That much was expected, but he also floated other ways to continue funneling public dollars into religious private schools by creating an “education dividend” that would only be paid to the families of home school students to spend however they want.
“We don’t ask people how they spend their PFD. For all we know, we may have families using their thousands of dollars in their collective PFDs on their churches. We don’t ask what they do or how they spend their money. So we may be looking at an educational dividend,” said Dunleavy.
He also suggested a “K-14 scholarship” program that would redirect funding from the state’s university scholarship fund to give home school students an additional scholarship to be spent however they want.
Any such proposal would have to clear the Alaska Legislature, which isn’t looking particularly likely given the dwindling days of the legislative session and the bruising fights over Dunleavy’s veto of a bipartisan education funding bill last month.
On Tuesday, Senate leadership outlined its opposition to changing the Alaska Constitution, and several members said that while they supported giving parents greater control over their homeschooling, they didn’t support violating the Alaska Constitution.
Instead, senators have argued that the program can be fixed with better oversight to ensure that money isn’t going to private and religious schools.
As for the case, the plaintiffs have taken a somewhat unusual step of asking for a stay on the order to allow families to close out the year. Dunleavy and Taylor said they plan to file their attempt for an indefinite stay along with an appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court on Monday.
In the meantime, AG Taylor told school districts to push ahead with the spending that Judge Zeman ruled was unconstitutional, claiming that the lawsuit is only binding to the parties involved. Not everyone has bought that line of thinking, and the Anchorage School District announced this week that it has paused reimbursements while it awaits the outcome of the requested stay.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.