Lawmakers this week are reviewing legislation to restore the state’s home-school system after much of it was struck down over a provision that allowed public funding to go to private and religious schools, a violation of the Alaska Constitution. The House and Senate have staked out very different approaches — with the Senate plan containing more spending guardrails and accountability provisions than the House — that reflect an underlying split on education policy in Alaska.
But Gov. Mike Dunleavy made clear on Wednesday that he thinks legislators are wasting their time and signaled yet another veto of any legislation approved before a lengthy legal appeal process is resolved, which could take months or longer.
In an informal news conference with reporters on Wednesday, the governor and his legal team painted the ruling as a cataclysmic event for the state’s public education system, not just for the home-school programs. They continued to insist that the ruling is so incredibly broad that it could bar nearly all spending in the public education system.
“This is literally a disaster, and potentially an emergency because of its magnitude,” Dunleavy said.
The governor’s stance is rooted in a broad interpretation of the ruling, suggesting that it could prohibit any public spending on any private-sector educational organizations. This, they argue, could extend to ordinary expenses like textbooks, bus drivers and cleaning supplies.
However, this viewpoint is not widely shared.
Attorneys for the Alaska Legislature and the plaintiffs in the case argue that the ruling was more narrow than the governor claims and can be remedied with a relatively straightforward fix in state law or even through Department of Education regulations.
“May the executive branch implement these pre-2014 regulations again to ‘fix’ the correspondence program allotment issue raised in the Superior Court? The short answer is yes,” explains a memo from Legislative Legal. “Nothing currently precludes the state board from enacting regulations governing correspondence study programs, including regulations that are similar in substance to (home-school laws) … The regulations, however, may not permit the use of public funds for the direct benefit of private or religious educational institutions.”
It’s that last line that’s a problem for the governor and his legal team.
Despite the Alaska Constitution’s explicit prohibition on public funding going to private and religious schools, the governor has been a firm supporter of the practice. It was changes that he authored as a state senator in 2014 that loosened oversight on home-school spending, which ultimately saw families use home-school allotments as direct subsidies for tuition at private and religious schools. Other families with kids in private and religious schools enrolled in home-school programs — including several Republican legislators — are using allotments to cover extracurriculars such as travel, memberships and horseback-riding lessons.
The governor, whose previous attempts to amend the Alaska Constitution have been rejected by legislators and voters, has been particularly keen on fighting to maintain the practice and indicated that he plans to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to allow the spending to continue. That likely would extend any resolution to the case for years, and the governor has argued that the ruling should be put on hold indefinitely.
In the Alaska Legislature, there’s been more interest in restoring some kind of home-school laws, recognizing that the roughly 22,000 students in home-school programs need some certainty before heading into the next school year. The approaches, however, are very different.
The Senate is pushing ahead with a bill that would enact guardrails that are largely similar to what was on the books before the 2014 changes, explicitly barring any spending at private and religious schools. It would also prohibit spending on things like family travel, pets, furniture, entertainment and other things that aren’t directly related to their learning plans. It would also improve data collection and oversight on spending, addressing blind spots that have frustrated legislators this session. It also would end a blanket opt-out provision for home-school students in an effort to better understand how the programs are doing.
While Dunleavy and his allies have argued home-school programs are superior to traditional neighborhood schools when it comes to academic outcomes, others have pointed out that fewer than one in five home-school students actually take those tests.
Such accountability measures, though, haven’t gained much traction in the Republican-led House. House Education Committee co-chair Rep. Justin Ruffridge, a Soldotna Republican who uses the home-school allotment program to send his private school kids to extracurriculars, has opposed previous efforts to increase accountability for home-school programs. That was reflected in the House version of the home-school bill.
Unlike the Senate bill, that legislation contains few guardrails over how the money could be spent. It simply directs the Board of Education, which is also filled with advocates of spending public money on private and religious schools, to develop a new program via regulations. The only guardrail in the program says it has to abide by whatever rules are set out in the Alaska Constitution.
Both Senate Bill 266 and House Bill 400 are set for continued hearings on Friday. Judge Zeman is expected to rule on a potential pause for his ruling as early as this week.
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.