A group of Alaska parents and teachers filed a complaint Thursday naming four school districts, including the state’s two largest, in a lawsuit alleging Alaska’s publicly funded homeschooling program is being used to cover the cost of private school tuition.
In doing so, the plaintiffs rekindled a legal debate that could have implications for the roughly 23,000 correspondence school students in Alaska and the state’s public education system more broadly.
Alaska’s correspondence programs allow students across the state to be homeschooled under the authority of public school districts. The families of the students receive thousands of dollars per year in reimbursements — paid with public money — for education-related expenses. The plaintiffs in the case allege that some of those funds have been used to offset the cost of sending children to religious private schools.
In a Thursday filing in Anchorage Superior Court, the plaintiffs asked the court to add the Anchorage School District, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, the Denali Borough School District and the Galena City School District as defendants in the case.
Collectively, programs run by those districts account for more than half of the correspondence students in the state.
Thursday’s amended complaint comes in a lawsuit that was originally filed against the state in 2023. An Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled last year in favor of the plaintiffs, writing that use of public funds to cover the cost of private school tuition was, in fact, illegal. The state appealed the case to the Alaska Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court’s order and sent the case back to the lower court, asking the plaintiffs to name the specific school districts they allege were violating the law.
[Alaska’s test scores fuel political debate on future of schools]
At the center of the case is one sentence in the Alaska Constitution: “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a proponent of correspondence programs, in 2013 tried — when he was a member of the state Senate — to remove that sentence from the state Constitution. That effort failed, but Dunleavy succeeded in passing a legislative overhaul that expanded the ways correspondence allotments could be used and reduced the Alaska education department’s oversight over the funds.
Though the court case remained unresolved, Dunleavy — a former correspondence program administrator in the Mat-Su Borough — has said that the plaintiffs “lost” their court challenge, and that correspondence programs can continue to operate as they had prior to the lawsuit.
Dunleavy’s spokespeople directed questions about Thursday’s filing to the Department of Law.
In a statement, Attorney General Treg Taylor — who himself has used correspondence allotments to cover the cost of his children’s private school tuition — said that the state would defend the programs in court.
Taylor said the prior ruling from the Alaska Supreme Court meant that correspondence programs would not be broadly invalidated by the court challenge. Rather, the litigation would focus specifically on whether funding could be spent at private schools.
“The good news is that our statutes are safe,” Taylor said.
“We will have to evaluate and defend against (the plaintiffs') claims, but in the meantime, families can be assured that the program will continue,” he added.
The filing comes as the governor is working with lawmakers to find common ground on education funding and policy. Lawmakers in the House and Senate majorities say they want to adopt a funding increase that will address what is widely seen as a crisis in the state’s education system, after years without a major change to the education funding formula.
Meanwhile, Dunleavy said he wants any funding increase to be paired with policy overhauls, including ones that would increase the amount of money the state spends on correspondence programs by more than $40 million, and create more avenues for charter school authorization.
Correspondence students make up roughly 17% of Alaska’s public school enrollment. Their numbers shot up rapidly during the coronavirus pandemic, when many public schools were closed to in-person instruction. Participation in the programs has since gone down, but it remains far above pre-pandemic levels.
Lawmakers and public school administrators have said it is difficult to track the impact of public funding going to correspondence programs because the vast majority of participants do not participate in statewide testing, and the state does not require any districts to report information on how the allotments are used. A recent review found that the high school graduation rates of correspondence students are lower than those of public school students overall.
The Superior Court ruling issued last year spurred an immediate flurry of concern among the thousands of families who rely on correspondence programs to educate their children, who worried that the court decision could preclude allotments altogether.
Correspondence program administrators told lawmakers that the vast majority of funds disbursed to families are not used to cover the cost of private school tuition. But the Alaska education department said it had no way of quantifying how much public funding had been diverted in recent years to private schools, because it did not track those numbers.
According to the lawsuit, the Anchorage School District permits half of a student’s allotment to pay for part-time enrollment in private school. Allotments in the district’s three correspondence programs range from $1,800 to $4,000. Other districts named in the suit have more permissive policies, which allow a student’s entire allotment to be used for private school tuition, according to the lawsuit.
Anchorage School District spokesperson Corey Allen Young said in a statement Thursday that the district is reviewing the merits of the court filing with its legal counsel.
“The District is committed to following the Alaska Constitution and any rulings of Alaska courts on the use of correspondence school allotments,” Young said.
A spokesperson for the Mat-Su Borough School District said the district was unable to comment on pending litigation. Officials at the Denali Borough and Galena City school districts could not immediately be reached.
The plaintiffs in the case are asking the court to rule that the use of public funds to cover full- or part-time tuition at private schools is unconstitutional.
The practice of using correspondence allotments to cover private school tuition was popularized, in part, thanks to encouragement from the wife of Taylor, the attorney general. Jodi Taylor in 2022 wrote detailed instructions on how to receive the public allotment to cover the cost of private school tuition on the website of the Alaska Policy Forum, a conservative advocacy group.
Taylor said in 2022 that she used public funds allotted through the Anchorage School District’s Family Partnership Charter School to pay most of the tuition at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a private Catholic school, for her two youngest children.
The Anchorage School District took over the Family Partnership Charter School the following year, citing problems with its management.
Anchorage schools superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said on Wednesday, prior to the filing of the amended complaint, that he worried that Dunleavy’s proposals to expand charter and correspondence schools are “putting us on a path of a low accountability culture.”
“As I’ve learned in my personal experience, a charter school is actually not liable if they’re violating the constitution or breaking the law. That’s actually a liability to the school district,” said Bryantt.
Scott Kendall, an Anchorage attorney representing the plaintiffs, said they chose which school districts to name as defendants in the case to ensure they encompass the array of correspondence programs in the state.
The Galena City School District, based in a village with a population of around 450, operates IDEA, the largest school in the state, with an enrollment of more than 7,500 students. In Anchorage, on the other hand, the district’s three correspondence programs serve fewer than 2,000 students, a minority of the district’s enrollment.
The districts also represent an array of approaches on the use of allotment funds. While the Anchorage district has attempted to put guardrails on the use of allotments, other districts have been more permissive, Kendall said.
“We want as robust a ruling as possible,” said Kendall.
Such a ruling, Kendall said, could ultimately have significant fiscal impacts for the state as it faces a budget shortfall.
It remains unclear how much state funding is going toward private school tuition, but Kendall said the amount is likely in the “tens of millions.”
That money could be used potentially to boost funding for traditional public schools, Kendall said. “Or some other gap in the budget,” he added.
“So it’s just very important, in the larger sense, in state operations, to know: Is this spending legal, or is it not?”