A lawsuit that clouded the future of homeschooling in Alaska for months last spring took on new life Thursday as the plaintiffs asked a judge to join four school districts as defendants in the long-running case.
The plaintiffs challenge homeschoolers’ use of state funding for tuition at private and religious schools. Under the state’s correspondence school program, districts can provide parents with an “allotment” of up to $4,500 per child per year to purchase supplies, curriculum and other educational resources — and some programs allow parents to use their allotments at private schools.
"The heart of this case is about students enrolled in homeschool, but nonetheless going to private schools, and essentially the reimbursement of their tuition at private schools being paid with public money," said Scott Kendall, an attorney representing the four public school parents and teachers who filed the suit.
The plaintiffs argue that practice violates the Alaska Constitution, which says in Article VII, Section 1, “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
Last April, an Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled that the laws enabling the correspondence program did violate the Constitution. But just before the ruling was set to take effect in June, the Alaska Supreme Court put the case on hold and sent it back to the lower court. In an eight-page summary ruling, the justices said that the plaintiffs should have sued school districts, rather than the state. That’s because districts approve the vendors with whom correspondence students can spend their allotments.
Kendall said Thursday’s filing responds to the Supreme Court’s ruling and looks to move the case forward.
"We have found four school districts that are representative of different, sort of, uses or abuses of the system, and they account collectively for over half of the homeschool students in the state," he said.
The four districts named in the suit are in Anchorage, the Mat-Su Borough, the Yukon River community of Galena and the Denali Borough, all of which run sizable correspondence school programs. Officials in Anchorage and Galena said they were reviewing the case.
Attorney General Treg Taylor said in a statement that the state would “evaluate and defend against” the new claims but said parents should rest assured that the correspondence program would continue.
“It looks like we are going to be back in court fighting for families who choose to get a public school education for their children through the public correspondence program,” Taylor said in a statement that characterized the case as an “NEA lawsuit.”
Kendall said the state’s largest teachers union, NEA-Alaska, had provided financial support for the case but said the case is “controlled by the named plaintiffs.”
Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, who has been a vocal proponent of correspondence education, said she hopes the case will clarify what the state Constitution says about spending public money at private schools.
"I care about every child and every teacher, and so I don't know who would say no to a child having the best learning environment," she said. "If a child is in a particular kind of school that's not working for that child, I think as a state, we should support allowing that child to be in a school."
Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, held Education Committee meetings last year to listen to correspondence school families and said she’ll be tracking the case to determine whether lawmakers should make changes aimed at ensuring parents spend their allotments in line with the Constitution.
"There were several folks who said that they also used their allotments to offset their tuition to private schools," she said. "From my reading, my plain reading of our Constitution, it indicates that those are not necessarily constitutional uses."
The case is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Kendall says he expects a final decision to come from the Alaska Supreme Court.
