In the final hours of the legislative session, it appeared that legislators reached a deal to fix a constitutional flaw in Alaska’s home-school program, bringing some certainty to the more than 20,000 students and their families enrolled in the programs.
However, regulations that could stabilize home-school families are not coming anytime soon, if at all, as the Dunleavy administration continues its push for public spending on private and religious schools.
The fix approved by legislators directed the state Board of Education to approve regulations that ensured public money didn’t continue to flow to private and religious schools, which a judge found was happening under a set of laws crafted by then-Sen. Dunleavy and approved in 2014. Those laws lifted much of the state oversight on home-school spending and, in some cases, allowed parents to use the funding as subsidies for private and religious school tuition.
The judge found it to be so constitutionally flawed that he struck down a broad range of home-school laws, putting it on the Legislature to fix. The Alaska Constitution explicitly states that “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
The legislative solution was about as straightforward a fix as possible, with the hope that things could be resolved in time for the start of the school year and legislators could avoid a summer special session heading into the election season. It would also restore some limited reporting requirements that were erased in 2014. The legislation — which is attached to a bill requiring schools to have drugs that treat opioid overdoses on-site — has yet to be transmitted to the governor, but legislators have hoped that the state would be ready.
Instead, at the state Board of Education’s June meeting, state officials said they’re not in any hurry to develop the regulations while they wait to see if the state’s appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court will reverse the lower court’s ruling and allow the spending to continue.
“The tricky part is that we need to know what the Alaska Supreme Court is going to say,” Assistant Attorney General Susan Sonneborn told the board, according to a report by the Alaska Beacon. “It may not even be necessary to have regulations because the Supreme Court could decide to overturn the Superior Court decision, in which case then we have our statutes in place already; we wouldn’t need regulations.”
Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman, who was appointed by Dunleavy, rejected the state’s request for an indefinite pause on the case, finding it was unlikely to prevail in the appeal.
Gov. Dunleavy and many far-right Republican allies have defended the spending that the judge ruled was a violation of the Alaska Constitution, arguing that the benefit isn’t going to the schools but the families themselves. The judge disagreed, noting that a single family could incur more than a quarter-million dollars of spending on private and religious schools from the public coffers.
While Dunleavy has bristled at accusations that the program was an intentional effort to skirt the Alaska Constitution and implement what is essentially a voucher program, he has also conceded that he fully supports public spending on private and religious schools.
While the Alaska Supreme Court is set to take up oral arguments in the case at the end of this month, Dunleavy has hinted at plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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 Bluesky.
