Alaska House Republicans made clear they have no intention of fixing the state’s home-school laws anytime soon when they approved a resolution calling for a 14-month pause to a judge’s ruling that struck down large swaths of the law as unconstitutional.
Insisting that they’re entirely incapable of coming up with a solution before the start of the next school year this fall, many Republicans claimed the only course of action is to ask the courts to allow public school money to continue to flow to private and religious schools through at least June 2025 while they ponder a workable solution.
“This is simply asking the court for that time,” said House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage. “It says please give us time to inform those 22,000 students to come up with some resolutions so we don’t pull the rug out from those people.”
The resolution passed 20-18.
Anchorage Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, ruled earlier this month that the state’s home-school allotment program had such serious constitutional flaws that it must be struck down. At the heart of the issue are changes that Sen. Mike Dunleavy managed to pass in 2014 that removed much of the oversight for the home school allotment program — which was meant to reimburse home-school families for the cost of things like curriculum, supplies and other lessons — and allowed families to use it to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools.
The Alaska Constitution explicitly prohibits public money from being spent “for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.” Judge Zeman wrote that subsidizing private and religious school tuition is clearly a violation of that rule, noting that schools could receive hundreds of thousands of public education dollars from a single family over the course of their children’s education.
Several Republican legislators — Reps. Stapp, Vance, Carpenter, Ruffridge and Tomaszewski— conceded during Wednesday’s debate that they receive the allotments.
While it’s not clear how extensive the practice of subsidizing private and religious school tuition is, it is clear that it became widespread once Dunleavy became governor, with several groups and individuals — including the spouse of Attorney General Treg Taylor — writing out instructions on how to take advantage of the home school allotments. In perhaps the most brazen example, Jodi Taylor wrote an editorial about how she was using a $4,000 home school allotment to cover most of their child’s $6,000 private school tuition.
At a news conference last week, Dunleavy said that he supported public money being used in that manner, claiming it’s the families — not the private and religious schools — that were receiving the benefit. He also floated other ways to skirt the Alaska Constitution.
Republicans, including Gov. Dunleavy and AG Taylor, have claimed that the ruling is so broad that the very underpinnings of public education in Alaska are at risk. They’ve claimed that the ruling — which was specifically about money going to private and religious schools — may block schools from buying textbooks or paper towels.
Supporters of the lawsuit say that’s false and an intentional effort to muddy the waters.
“That is one million percent false,” Scott Kendall, the attorney representing the plaintiffs in the case, told Alaska Public Media about the governor’s claims. “They kept repeating, ‘The judge said correspondence schools are unconstitutional. We can’t have this anymore.’ And that is fundamentally incorrect. The judge said, ‘You have constructed the correspondence school statute in a way that’s blatantly unconstitutional. I can’t fix it. I’m not a legislator. I’m the court. The Legislature can fix it.’”
Judge Zeman quite literally wrote that “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 this Court’s role.”
But Wednesday proved there’s little interest in quickly placing the necessary guardrails on the program.
Instead, the only legislative fix being advanced by House Republicans is a constitutional amendment to strike the prohibition on public spending on private and religious schools altogether. Such a move would also open the door to school vouchers, direct payments from the state to private and religious schools that typically cover only part of the tuition.
However, with a two-thirds majority needed from each chamber to advance the measure to the public for a vote, the measure is little more than a bit of virtue signaling by right-wing legislators.
Several members of the bipartisan House Minority Coalition argued that was the case with the Sense of the House Resolution, with several questioning whether it would actually force the Legislature to get involved in the legal proceedings, and offered amendments that would have either shortened the requested stay or reinforced the need for the Legislature to act in the remaining weeks of the legislative session. Several legislators noted that a fix for the home-school allotment program could easily go hand-in-hand with a broader education package that increases funding and approves other changes.
But that’s only doable if legislators are actually serious about halting the flow of public education dollars to private and religious schools.
House Minority Leader Rep. Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage, said it looked like they just wanted to allow the unconstitutional practice to continue as long as possible.
“That will allow for unconstitutional spending of state dollars,” he asked during the debate, noting legislators have taken an oath to uphold the Alaska Constitution. “What are we doing here if we’re supporting that? If we’re saying, go ahead and ignore the courts, ignore our laws, ignore our constitution and just go ahead and spend the money anyway? Why would that be the position that we’re taking. It seems to just provide an excuse to not take action, to kick the can down the road.”
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.