AKLEG Day 112: 'Mischaracterizes and misreads'
AKLEG Day 112: 'Mischaracterizes and misreads'
The problem with the legislative fixes is that they restore guardrails to the home-school program, firmly shutting the lid on the cookie jar that Dunleavy and his allies had their hand in.
Good morning, Alaska!
In this edition: Let’s catch up on last week’s order that put the home-school ruling on hold through the end of the school year. Notably, Superior Court Judge Zeman’s order not only clarified the timeline ahead but also addressed Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s runaway hysteria over what the ruling means for Alaska. The governor, who has not been shy about admitting the system was working as intended, has been playing to families’ anxiety about what’s next in hopes of maintaining public spending on private and religious schools.
Current mood: 🌦️
‘Mischaracterizes and misreads’
Alaska’s home-school system, which has been morphed into a pseudo-voucher system to supplement and subsidize the education of kids at private and religious schools, can continue through the end of the school year. That’s the ruling of Anchorage Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman, who last week granted the plaintiffs’ request to put the ruling on hold through June 30, 2024, and rejected the indefinite stay requested by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
“This court finds that a limited stay is the best solution to ensure that students, families and school districts are protected from undue disruption and all parties are protected from unnecessary uncertainty and unrelated harms,” Judge Zeman wrote in his order. “A limited state until the end of the fiscal year will ensure any correspondence allotments that were taken in reliance on (the unconstitutional laws) will be honored while minimizing the potential for continued unfettered unconstitutional spending.”
More: Judge Zeman’s order putting his ruling on hold
While the ruling—and, likely, the pause—will face appeals to the Alaska Supreme Court, it gives us a better look at the road ahead. This is to say that something needs to be done between now and the next school year for the public home-school system to continue in a recognizable form. Whether that’s new legislation (as has been proposed in the House and Senate), a constitutional amendment (as has been proposed by extreme-right Republicans in the House), or via simple regulation (as the Legislature’s attorneys say is possible) is not clear, but they all appear to be on the table.
What is not, though, is Gov. Dunleavy’s histrionics over what the ruling means for the school system at large. Since the ruling landed, the governor and his legal team have argued that it is so broad and reaching that it could upend the entire public education system. At the heart of their argument is the claim that Judge Zeman’s ruling striking down home-school laws that allowed public funds to be spent on private and religious schools—which is prohibited in the Alaska Constitution—somehow extends to public school spending on textbooks, bus driver contracts and mops.
“This is literally a disaster, and potentially an emergency because of its magnitude,” Dunleavy said at an informal news conference last Wednesday, where he threatened to veto any legislative fixes until the legal appeals run their course.
It’s a baffling read on the ruling, frankly, but there’s a method to the madness. Those claims fuel the alarmism that the governor and his allies likely see as an opportunity to push their luck and finally break down the constitutional prohibition on public dollars going to private and religious schools. Dunleavy has already previewed lengthy legal appeals, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, and already floated special sessions and more on the home-school system, all while giving an endorsement of the underlying unconstitutional practice (after all, he was the one who authored much of the laws that are at issue).
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs and the Alaska Legislature disagree, arguing that the ruling was narrow in scope and could be resolved through relatively simple fixes in either law or regulation that restore the guardrails to ensure unconstitutional spending can’t continue.
And now we can count Judge Zeman among that group.
In his order, Judge Zeman wrote that the state “mischaracterizes and misreads” his order. He said it’s not nearly as sweeping as the governor has claimed and doesn’t address anything other than the state’s home-school programs.
“Once again, the state mischaracterizes this court’s previous order. The only statutes at issue in this case concern the correspondence allotment program; as a result, this court’s order finding those statutes unconstitutional only affects those statutes,” he wrote. “To reiterate, it is not the court’s role to draft legislation or determine policy for the state through impermissibly revising otherwise unconstitutional statutes.”
However, the problem with the legislative fixes advancing through the process is that they restore those guardrails, firmly shutting the lid on the cookie jar that Dunleavy and his allies had their hand in. A legal memo produced by the Alaska Legislature’s attorneys outlines this well.
“May the executive branch implement these pre-2014 regulations again to ‘fix’ the correspondence program allotment issue raised in the Superior Court? The short answer is yes,” explains the memo, adding, “The regulations, however, may not permit the use of public funds for the direct benefit of private or religious educational institutions.”
And that, for Dunleavy and allies, is the problem.