To preserve correspondence schools, state just needs to end unconstitutional spending
The haphazard handling of the Dunleavy administration response to the landmark court ruling on correspondence schools continued Friday with Gov. Mike Dunleavy reversing the position he had taken two days earlier.
“This is literally a disaster, potentially, an emergency because of its magnitude,” he told reporters Wednesday.
It is not literally a disaster. And it is not an emergency.
It is a problem that can be solved. It’s hard to do that, however, when the governor and his attorney general are more interested in creating hysteria and getting people angry than in solving the problem.
They seem to think that screaming the sky is falling will be a winning strategy. It’s deceptive and dishonest.
“Gov. Mike Dunleavy suggested Wednesday that he would veto any related bills before the state Supreme Court weighs in on the program’s status,” is how the Alaska Beacon put it.
No legislation could possibly fix things, Dunleavy said, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Why? Because Dunleavy and AG Tregarrick Taylor claimed that the April 12th court ruling from Anchorage Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman found all correspondence study programs in Alaska unconstitutional.
The state argued this in court documents.
But Zeman did no such thing.
He declared the allotment provision adopted a decade ago unconstitutional. The political spin of the Dunleavy administration, chosen to spread panic, was a clear misinterpretation of the court ruling.
On Thursday, Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman wrote that the Dunleavy administration “mischaracterizes and misreads” the April 12th decision in the case with its claim.
The only law at issue in the case is the one written a decade ago that expanded the allotment program in an unconstitutional fashion. Sen. Mike Dunleavy admitted at the time that it was unconstitutional.
Zeman said correspondence study programs still exist and are allowed under the Constitution. He said the state claims that spending on computers and textbooks would be illegal under the decision are false.
“To reiterate, it is not the court’s role to draft legislation and determine policy for the state through impermissibly revising otherwise unconstitutional statutes,” Zeman wrote.
“Correspondence (homeschool) programs existed before AS 12.03.300-.310 were enacted and correspondence programs continue to exist after this court’s order,” Zeman wrote.
Lawyers for the Alaska Legislature had already concluded by April 23rd that the Dunleavy administration was wrong and that a simple legislative fix could keep correspondence schools in operation. The court did not strike down the other statutes dealing with correspondence schools, they said.
On Friday, Dunleavy and Taylor abandoned their previous position that a legislative fix was impossible.
Taylor said the judge had “clarified” the ruling in a way that would “open up the possibility of an interim solution.”
The judge did not clarify the ruling. He merely wrote that the Dunleavy interpretation was wrong, which was already clear to legislative lawyers and the plaintiffs in the case.
On Friday, Dunleavy abandoned his Wednesday disaster declaration, saying the situation was no longer hopeless. A bill in the state House “could be a vehicle to ensure Alaska’s public homeschooling through the correspondence program remains intact and functions in a manner conducive to the educational needs of its more than 22,000 students, thousands of parents and thousands of vendors that assist with the correspondence process.”
The way to keep correspondence education in operation is to approve a bill so that the system does not violate the Alaska Constitution, which forbids using public funds for the direct benefit of private schools.
Dunleavy and Taylor have added a great deal to the confusion and uncertainty by injecting their own political views into the matter—they both want to spend public funds on private schools, which is unconstitutional.
The best account I’ve read about how the situation can be resolved to keep correspondence schools in operation and follow the Constitution is in a court filing by Scott Kendall and Lauren Sherman, attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case.
The Legislature can fix the problem by adopting a plan that does not permit unconstitutional spending, including tuition for private schools. It can also give direction to the state school board for emergency regulations.
One big problem is that the Dunleavy administration won’t admit that Sen. Mike Dunleavy was right a decade ago when he said that his plan to spend public funds on private schools was unconstitutional.
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