'Stickergate' school complaint collapses
The right-wing hysteria fomented by Attorney General Stephen Cox and Education Commissioner Deena Bishop about stickers on a Hillsdale College pamphlet distributed in some Anchorage schools is founded on a pile of half-truths and sloppy homework.
The two of them are spreading the lie that the Anchorage School District does not believe in the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution.
We need more sense and less nonsense from the top state lawyer and education official, who are making a mountain out of the Stickergate molehill.
The temporary attorney general doesn’t recognize his conflict of interest in dealing with a partisan Hillsdale College publication that includes a right-wing spin on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.
Cox, 48, and his wife are co-founders of a proposed Anchorage private school backed by Hillsdale College. Cox sought the support of Hillsdale for his school.
Cox is a partisan player, who should have had the sense to stay out of this. Hillsdale will provide training and curriculum for use in the Christian school Cox hopes will open next fall and Cox has high praise for Hillsdale employees.
The conflicted general suggested that members of the Anchorage School Board have violated the oath of office, a reckless and unjustified claim.
“Alaska law requires school board members to sign—and swear to support and defend—the U.S. Constitution. When a public school district says it won't endorse the Constitution or the Declaration, or ‘the viewpoints expressed in them,’ something has gone terribly wrong,” Cox claimed in a statement.
He based all this on his own assumptions and false claims in a right-wing blog piece written by a young woman, a 2025 Hillsdale graduate, who is the daughter of the woman hired to head the new private school Cox is promoting.
The temporary general is also out of his legal lane, which is understandable for someone like him who didn’t join the Alaska Bar Association until May 7, 2025 and has little experience in Alaska law.
The Anchorage School District is run by a local school board, not by the state, and doesn’t answer to the general.
“We do not believe the State of Alaska’s attorney general is vested with any statutory or constitutional powers supporting your lengthy demands for information contained in your November 14 letter,” attorney Matt Singer wrote on behalf of the school district.
For her part, Bishop has either forgotten or is pretending to forget that she was the Anchorage superintendent in 2021 when the same complaint reached her about the same disclaimer on the same Hillsdale booklet.
She didn’t question the district’s loyalty to the Constitution then.
But she is now.
“By mistakenly applying disclaimers to them, (the pamphlets) ASD invited confusion about which principles its public schools affirm and teach,” Cox and Bishop wrote last week, demanding answers about how the district could go so wrong.
This is either amnesia or deception on Bishop’s part.
To review, Hillsdale College distributes pamphlets nationwide for free to raise funds, awareness and promote its point of view.
“In recent decades, the way our government operates has departed from the Constitution,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn writes in the pamphlet, a single sentence that is more than enough to earn a disclaimer from any public school about what to believe.
The pamphlets also promote a Hillsdale course in which the college attacks the New Deal of FDR as unconstitutional overreach. Arnn has long favored privatizing Social Security and attacked public education and programs for the needy, wrapping himself in the Constitution.
“The system of philanthropy, unique to our country, that had prevented people who suffered misfortune from starving, is now replaced by a general system of taxpayer aid that has encouraged the destruction of family life, the essential way to raise children,” Arnn wrote 20 years ago.
(I wrote here incorrectly on November 11 that Hillsdale attached the stickers. Members of the DAR who got the booklets from Hillsdale did that before handing them over to the district.)
An attorney for the school district wrote to Cox and Bishop Tuesday that a May 1, 2021 email to Bishop and the members of the school board complained about why the district had attached the same disclaimer to the Hillsdale pamphlet given to students that year: “The Anchorage School District does not endorse these materials or the viewpoint expressed in them.”
I filed a public records request for the documents about this issue and background.
“Please also explain why ASD (Anchorage School District) does not approve of the US Declaration of Independence not the US Constitution. What do you stand for?” the Anchorage parent complained to Bishop and school board members on May 1, 2021.
The parent, who had four kids in the schools, included photos of the front and back of the Hillsdale pamphlet so Bishop has no business in claiming she didn’t know what was going on.
Singer, the attorney for the school district, wrote that there is no record that “Bishop ever responded to this citizen or that the issue was addressed.”
Of the numerous critical questions that Cox and Bishop put to the district in their complaint last week about Stickergate, Bishop should have been able to answer most of them herself.
Cox and Bishop asked whether the district had ever “received prior complaints or questions about the use of these stickers or their placement on non-flyer materials?”
They demanded to know “Were any other books or educational materials (as opposed to flyers) ever marked with similar disclaimers?”
“Were ASD employees or volunteers involved in inspecting the stickers, and if so, under whose direction?”
And they demanded to know which school district officials were involved in Stickergate.
Bishop knew about this years ago.
Since she now regards this as a critical failure by the school district and its leaders, she has some explaining to do. The truth is that it’s not a critical failure by the school district at all. The failure is by the attorney general and the education commissioner.
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Assuming that what he read on Must Read Alaska was true, Attorney General Stephen Cox suggested that the Anchorage school board members violated the oath of office and “something has gone terribly wrong.”