In the run-up to the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers previewed some of their priorities for the upcoming year, including a ban on masked police officers, rules against AI impersonation and amped-up testing of homeschool students.
The legislation was released on Friday as part of the Legislature’s pre-file process, which allows bills to be submitted ahead of the legislative session. Broadly speaking, every bill faces a long shot to becoming law — particularly in the age of a veto-happy Gov. Mike Dunleavy — but they signal some of the big areas of focus for the next session.
Education and crime were among the biggest topics.
One of the most eye-catching bills is House Bill 250, by Juneau Democratic Rep. Sara Hannan. It would make it a Class B misdemeanor for on-duty police officers to conceal their identities with masks or disguises. The bill, which has carve-outs for legitimate face coverings like medical masks, face shields and respirators, wasn’t meant as a response to ICE officers killing Renee Good last week but a broader response to growing concerns over policing, Hannan told the Alaska Beacon.
“Many of our law enforcement encounters with people, is an attempt to de-escalate and understand a situation, and so much of communication is nonverbal,” she said. “It’s body language, it’s facial visualizations, and I think it’s a huge disservice for it to become standard practice in standard enforcement activities to be masking faces of law enforcement officers.”
Other crime-related bills include HB 239, which would impose steeper penalties for hit-and-run deaths; and HB 242, which would clear up the law around a doctor sexually assaulting a patient (closing a loophole that allowed some charges against a Juneau chiropractor to be dismissed because the patient knew she was being assaulted).
On the education front, Anchorage independent Rep. Alyse Galvin has proposed a measure to provide clarity on how the state’s controversial homeschool programs are performing.
While conservatives like Gov. Dunleavy have insisted that homeschool families deserve larger funding increases than other students, there’s been significant skepticism about whether homeschool programs are doing as well as they claim. That’s because homeschool students broadly opt out of testing altogether, leaving a major blind spot in how nearly the nearly 20% of students in homeschool programs are actually doing. Fewer than 20% take standardized tests, compared to more than 90% of brick-and-mortar students. It’s left lawmakers seeking more clarity than just a handful of anecdotes from supporters.
To get to the bottom of it, Galvin’s bill, HB 248, essentially orders districts to increase the testing rate for homeschool students to equal or exceed that of the rest of the student body or risk losing funding.
The bill is likely to face considerable pushback from conservatives, who’ve chafed at efforts to mandate homeschool students participate in standardized testing — even though they are frequently demanding “accountability” measures for brick-and-mortar schools that would effectively punish underperforming schools with budget cuts.
Other school bills include a mathematics intervention program for students who’ve fallen behind that appears to be similar to the Alaska READS act (a well-meaning program that has never really been properly funded), another that would increase funding for special needs students, one that would allow school board members to be substitute teachers and another that would direct districts to take better account of bullying and provide suicide-prevention resources.
Rep. David Nelson, R-Anchorage, has a bill that tries to tackle the rise of AI impersonations and deepfakes in schools. HB 240 would require districts to add online harassment and “nonconsensual digital impersonation” (deepfakes) to their anti-bullying policies.
The bill is the latest in a handful of bills aimed at reining in AI-generated impersonations. There are two bills in the Senate, SB 2 and SB 33, that also address the use of deepfakes in elections and in defamation cases.
Other notable bills introduced ahead of the session include: HB 236, which would ban the sale of weight-loss and muscle-building drugs and supplements to minors; HB 238, which would add the American Academy of Pediatrics to the groups the state considers for vaccine guidelines (this comes after the CDC, under Trump, upended vaccine reccomendations); and SB 203, which would formally ban modifications to make automatic firing handguns.
A second set will be released Friday, and the session will begin on Jan. 20.