AG's family plan for Anchorage School District tuition payments collides with Constitution

When Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor said that an outside attorney has cleared him of any potential conflict of interest in the landmark private school funding case, he refused to provide details, claiming those are secrets under the attorney-client privilege.

He did say that “the situation with my kids schooling has changed significantly.”

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 full time in a private school and attempt to enroll them in a public correspondence school at the same time.

Other districts still grant public funds to pay for tuition and other expenses, however, for full-time private school students who enroll as public school correspondence students. There are no consistent rules enforced across the state under the hands-off approach favored by the attorney general and the governor.

Two years ago, Jodi Taylor announced plans to seek reimbursement from the Anchorage School District for $8,000 for tuition payments at a private Catholic school attended by their two youngest children, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.

The Taylors said the children would be full-time students in the private school, but they would also enroll in the Family Partnership Charter School and therefore qualify for a government allotment of more than $4,000 each.

An Anchorage Superior Court Judge has struck down the law providing the payments as unconstitutional, triggering howls from Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who championed the law in 2014, and from his attorney general.

A year ago, the Anchorage School District took over the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School because of management issues. Afterwards, it “learned of use of allotments that do not comply with the Alaska Constitution,” the district said.

“As a government entity, ASD cannot allow the unconstitutional use of allotments and is now taking action to correct the problem,” the district said.

In short, the plan outlined by the Taylors to have their tuition payments subsidized was unconstitutional, according to the Anchorage School District.

Full-time private school students cannot also qualify as public correspondence students, the district said.

“A full-time private school student is not eligible to dual enroll in ASD’s public correspondence schools and receive a public allotment. It does not matter what courses, materials, or equipment for which the student intends to use the allotment. Use of allotments in this manner would be supplementing a private school education, as opposed to a public-school education,” the district said.

The former Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School is now the Anchorage Family Partnership Correspondence School and it does not allow full-time students at private schools to have their tuition reimbursed with public money.

It does allow parents to use half or less than half of the annual allotment to pay for part-time enrollment at a private school in classes that do not deal with religion.

Here is a June 20, 2023 memo from the Anchorage school district about allotments.

One issue that did not appear to come up during that transition was the allegation that the Family Partnership Charter School had suggested to Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton school that its tuition be raised so that a larger portion of the public allotment could be used to reimburse parents for tuition.

The text below is from the minutes of a subcommittee set up by the Lumen Christi School Board, a private school in Anchorage, as it debated what use to make of the allotment program.

This was before the Anchorage School District decided that no full-time private school students could qualify for public correspondence school funds. The Lumen policy is to limit the use of allotments to sports, extracurricular activities and courses at UAF and the North Dakota Center of Distance Education. (I’ll have more on this in a future blog post.)

As I’ve written here, the Dunleavy administration has looked the other way and allowed school districts to create their own voucher programs. There is a patchwork of programs, many of them unconstitutional.

What the Anchorage School District defined as unconstitutional—even before the judge’s ruling last week—is accepted practice in other districts, such as in the Denali borough.

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 were required to take action on their own if they wanted to reject the state payments.

“This collaboration provides families with a reimbursement check of up to $3,000 per student to help cover their child’s academic expenses. Families may opt out of this partnership,” according to the school, formerly the Anchorage Christian School run by the former Anchorage Baptist Temple.

The principal of the Mountain City Christian Academy is Jessica Parker, the former principal of the former Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School.

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