The Alaska attorney general and his wife were involved in changing the policy of a former Anchorage charter school to pay for private school tuition in ways that haven’t been fully disclosed or examined.

Attorney general Tregarrick Taylor’s recusal on May 21, 2022 from the topic occurred many months after the Taylor lobbying campaign began. When Taylor recused himself, he created the impression that a column his wife had posted on May 16, 2022 was the first sign of her active engagement in pushing for public funds to be spent on private schools.

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Perhaps the most significant change in the past two years is that that the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School that his family planned to get $8,000 from no longer exists.

And public money from the Anchorage School District is no longer available to parents who have their kids enrolled fulltime in a private school and try to enroll in a public correspondence school as well.

Other districts still grant public funds to pay for tuition, however, for fulltime private school students who enroll as public school correspondence students at the same time.

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Alaska school districts did not call it a voucher system for private schools, but that’s what some of them have created, using a system that a state judge has declared unconstitutional.

Few of the districts have spelled out the working details so clearly as the CyberLynx Homeschool & Correspondence Program based in Nenana and largely state funded.

It had about 1,500 students statewide in 2022-2023, according to the Alaska Policy Forum, which promotes using state funds for private tuition.

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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.

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On 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.”

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The 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.

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Mountain 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.

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An 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.”

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The 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.

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In 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.

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