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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Alaskans deserve an intellectually honest report on the performance of charter schools, the makeup of the student population as compared to the general population and details on how much an expansion of charter schools will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

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There is one important lesson to draw from the Dunleavy demand to give his followers on the state school board the power to create charter schools—he is on a clear path to creating private school vouchers in Alaska, paid for with public money.

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Despite unanimous public opposition, the Dunleavy administration adopted regulations in late 2023 to allow the governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor to get free legal help from the Department of Law when ethics violations are alleged.
Rather than trying to amend the state ethics law through legislative action, they opted to sneak this past the public through a regulation change with no public hearing.

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Donald Handeland’s willing participation and leading role as chairman of Dunleavy’s compensation commission coup is reason enough for the Legislature to refuse to confirm Handeland to the latest important position he has been granted by Dunleavy, membership on the State of Alaska Personnel Board, arbiter of state ethics for the executive branch.

Dunleavy appointed Handeland to the personnel board on September 18 last year, filling a vacancy created when Craig Johnson was elected to the Legislature a year earlier.

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None of the four Regulatory Commission of Alaska commissioners attended an important hearing in Juneau on increasing funding levels for the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.

The commissioners should have been there to defend the request for additional funds, explain why one-third of the agency’s staff positions are vacant, answer questions on internal operations, respond to questions on complex rate cases and talk about what the RCA needs.

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The Senate Resources Committee announced a confirmation hearing on right-wing talk show host Mike Porcaro for his fisheries job Wednesday, but it was canceled before the hearing.

I’m waiting to hear back from legislators on when the hearing will be rescheduled.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy gave Porcaro a $136,000 state job on the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission last year, though even Porcaro says he never applied for the job, he knows nothing about fish and there aren’t enough hours in the day for the state to get its money’s worth out of him.

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The House Finance Committee took tentative steps to reduce forward funding for Outside attorneys for the statehood defense industry and cut two of the three new employees Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor wants to hire to handle investigative grand juries.

The decisions on amendments by Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson, both approved 6-5, would save the state $1.8 million.

House Republicans, who wrap themselves in the state flag and are guaranteed to support any lawsuit against the federal government, will try to restore $300,000 for grand jury staff and $1.5 million in statehood defense money, even though it will not be needed in the next fiscal year.

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Barbara Tyndall, named by Gov. Mike Dunleavy to the Alaska State Board of Education, was asked at a confirmation hearing March 20 if she agreed with the three-sentence provision in the Alaska Constitution that sets the standards for public schools.

Tyndall, who taught for 20 years at North Pole Christian School, said she went to a public school, graduating in Valdez in 1967. Her five kids went to public schools and she home-schooled them at times. She said she realizes public schools are secular.

“So yeah, I agree with that,” she said to Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson about the language in the Constitution. “For now.”

“For now,” Gray-Jackson said.

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There are not thousands of students on waiting lists in Alaska trying to get into charter schools, contrary to claims by the Dunleavy administration.

Education Commissioner Deena Bishop, who calls herself a “data nerd,” testified Wednesday that she believed there are about 2,000 students in Anchorage alone on waiting lists to get into charter schools. The real number is about 350.

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The Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority has developed the bad budget habit of bypassing the public and the legislative authorization process required by the Alaska Constitution and state law for capital projects.

AIDEA has done this routinely under Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who treats the corporation like a private development bank that answers only to him, operating with no oversight from the Legislature. State law says it’s not supposed to be that way.

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“I think the educational discussion is over and we got to move into energy,” Dunleavy said.

The lethargy conveyed in that sentence stands in contrast to the urgency of the situation in Alaska’s schools.

The state employee hired to lead the education department, Deena Bishop, is the model of lethargy when it comes to answering questions about what Dunleavy claimed was his priority before he moved onto energy.

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Sens. Robert Myers, Mike Shower and Reps. Frank Tomaszewski, Mike Cronk, Kevin McCabe, Mike Prax and Will Stapp said Brandy Harty no longer deserves to be school board president in Fairbanks.

Nonsense.

The politicians have yet to accept their share of the responsibility for the budget crisis facing Alaska schools. They are desperate to change the subject.

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The revised contract with Craig Richards as statehood defense coordinator for the Dunleavy administration expires at the end of May, but the agreement does not authorize enough money to pay him until then.

I’ve asked the attorney general’s office for an explanation on the discrepancy between the promise to pay Richards $12,000 a month until May 31 and a contract that is tens of thousands short.

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The $700 billion claim is bogus, about as reliable as the press release from Taylor’s office—which remains uncorrected on the AG’s website—that the state government created the $700 billion guess and that the federal government has violated the “statehood act of 1953.”

Perhaps the attorney general doesn’t know as much about the statehood defense industry as he lets on.

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