Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor reinserted himself into the debate over using public funds for private schools, almost two years after his wife announced plans for she and her husband to seek $8,000 in state funds to pay most of the cost of private school tuition for two of their children.
He says his conflict of interest no longer exists, hinting that it is because his family is not longer seeking public funds to pay for private school tuition in Anchorage.
Read MoreOn April 10, 2013 Sen. Mike Dunleavy gave an example of an unconstitutional plan for spending public funds that he wanted to legalize with a constitutional amendment.
“A parent could decide I want my child to take a Latin course at Monroe Catholic. The teacher could agree to that in the ILP,” referring to an individual learning plan, Dunleavy told the Senate Education Committee.
“Currently we cannot do that under the current constitutional language,” Dunleavy said, which is why he wanted to remove the sentence from the Alaska Constitution that says, “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
Read MoreThe plaintiffs in the landmark correspondence school case took a big step toward ending the immediate uncertainty over the future of the programs that serve thousands of students by asking for a stay in the order declaring the law unconstitutional until June 30, the end of the state fiscal year.
The Dunleavy administration will want a longer stay and it will appeal the loss, but it doesn’t have a strong hand in defending the governor’s desire to keep spending public money on private organizations or private and religious schools. The Alaska Constitution forbids it.
Read MoreMountain City Christian Academy uses the public correspondence school set up by the Denali Borough to automatically direct state payments to families of the church-run school. Families are required to take action on their own to reject the state payments.
Read MoreAn Anchorage Superior Court judge struck down a plan championed by Sen. Mike Dunleavy in 2014 to spend public money to benefit private schools as clearly unconstitutional.
Judge Adolf Zeman said there “is no workable way to construe the statutes to allow only constitutional spending and AS 14.03.300-310 must be struck down as unconstitutional in their entirety.”
Read MoreThe Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority didn’t bother to read the three new reports by respected Alaska economists Gregg Erickson and Milt Barker before denouncing the documents.
Legislators need to ask why the state-owned development bank is so quick to try to direct attention away from the poor financial returns and the opaque operations of AIDEA described in detail in the Erickson/Barker reports.
Read MoreIn one of three new reports released Wednesday, they said the flagship large loan participation program of AIDEA has created at most 15 new jobs a year.
“94 percent of the jobs AIDEA claims it created with its 2008‒2023 large loan participations are inflated numbers of jobs that would have been created by bank lending without AIDEA,” they wrote in AIDEA Loan Participation Program—A Closer Look.
Read MoreAlaskans deserve an intellectually honest report on the performance of charter schools, the makeup of the student population as compared to the general population and details on how much an expansion of charter schools will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Read MoreThere is one important lesson to draw from the Dunleavy demand to give his followers on the state school board the power to create charter schools—he is on a clear path to creating private school vouchers in Alaska, paid for with public money.
Read MoreDespite unanimous public opposition, the Dunleavy administration adopted regulations in late 2023 to allow the governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor to get free legal help from the Department of Law when ethics violations are alleged.
Rather than trying to amend the state ethics law through legislative action, they opted to sneak this past the public through a regulation change with no public hearing.
