On the final day of Alaska’s legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill directing the state board of education to adopt regulations governing correspondence programs. The vote came after a Superior Court judge determined that mail-in programs, which allow families of home-schooled children to receive state funding, violated the state constitution.
But three weeks after the final vote on the bill, it still has not been transmitted to Gov. Mike Dunleavy for his signature. And when the board of education met Wednesday in Kotzebue, it did not consider regulations related to the programs.
The legal dispute over Alaska’s correspondence programs will be heard by the Alaska Supreme Court on June 27, and education department officials indicated they would not send regulations to the board until the court hears the case.
The board of education voted Wednesday to hold a special meeting on July 1 at which they could discuss regulations for the correspondence program, Education Commission Deena Bishop said.
“We really hope to have more direction on how to meet the goal and ensure that the regulations we bring to you meet constitutional needs,” Bishop said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Alaska’s long-standing correspondence programs, which enrolled nearly 23,000 students last year, give families the option of receiving up to $4,500 per student per year to cover homeschooling costs, including textbooks , the study plan and other related expenses.
But under a law Dunleavy proposed when he was a state senator a decade ago, many limitations on the use of the funds were removed, and families (including Attorney General Treg Taylor’s) increasingly used the allocations to cover the cost of private investments. and religious school tuition.
After a group of parents and teachers challenged the practice in court, Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman in April struck down two key statutes governing the program, then issued a stay on the decision until the end of June. Dunleavy’s administration appealed Zeman’s ruling, arguing that using the funds to pay for private school education should remain legal.
The state last week filed its brief on the case with the Alaska Supreme Court, which was co-written by attorneys from the First Liberty Institute, a Texas-based legal organization focused on defending religious liberty.
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At a state board of education meeting in Kotzebue on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Susan Sonneborn told board members that the board could be expected to adopt emergency regulations on July 1, but that the proposed regulations would not be implemented. would be made public before the Supreme Court hearing.
“We have been reviewing with the governor’s office and reviewing and considering all options to ensure correspondence programs continue smoothly and without interruption, including potential new regulations. However, the exact form of the regulations will have to work in conjunction with what the Alaska Supreme Court decides,” Sonneborn told board members.
Sonneborn said that once the court issues its ruling, the board could meet and immediately implement emergency regulations without receiving public comment. The emergency regulations could remain in effect for 120 days before the board must take additional action.
“It’s a shorter period of time to implement them, deal with the emergency and then at that point need to go through the public comment process,” Sonneborn said.
Emergency regulations may be necessary on July 1 to keep correspondence programs running smoothly.
“On July 1 we are guaranteed to have emergency regulations for the state school board,” Bishop said.
“The tricky part is we need to know what the Alaska Supreme Court is going to say,” Sonneborn said. “It may not even be necessary to have regulations because the Supreme Court could decide to overturn the High Court decision, in which case we already have our statutes in place and would not need regulations. So it’s a bit of a wait and see.”
During the final weeks of the legislative session, several lawmakers, including Senate Education Committee Chairman Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, and House Education Committee Co-Chairman Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Anchorage, for Soldotna, said it was important for the Legislature to adopt a bill that would provide families of correspondence students certainty about the future of the programs before the end of the session.
House Bill 202 accomplishes this by directing the state board of education to “adopt regulations establishing standards for individual learning plans.” One of the statutes overturned by Zeman eliminated the legal framework for learning plans, which dictate how funds allocated to a student can be used.
The bill directs the board to adopt regulations that are consistent with the Alaska Constitution, which states that “no money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious educational institution or other private educational institution.”
Dunleavy and members of his administration have asserted that the use of appropriation funds (even to cover private school tuition) does not violate the state constitution.
The bill also directs the education department to “monitor the use of appropriations” distributed to students and provide an annual report that includes “an accounting of the student appropriation funds that have been disbursed.” Currently, the department does not track spending by correspondence students, making it difficult for state officials to know how many students use their allocations to cover the cost of private schools.
Once the bill is transmitted to Dunleavy’s office, he has several days to sign it, veto it or allow it to become law without his signature. Bishop said he supported the legislation and had conveyed that support to Dunleavy’s office.
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