A church school can’t exclude religious teaching from any part of its daily operations, so there is an inherent contradiction in claims that some courses have nothing to do with the values inherent in the religion.
But the lure of lucre is powerful, especially when the state makes public funds available, contrary to the clear constitutional mandate: “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”
Read MoreSo here we have Arkansas lawyer and Christian nationalist Bob Ballinger claiming he knows that the late Vic Fischer would support a constitutional amendment to allow state funds for private and religious schools.
I can guarantee you that Ballinger, who never met Vic Fischer, doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Read More“I don’t have any experience whatsoever in commercial fishing. And as I looked at the statutes and as everyone else looked at the statutes, that’s not a requirement to do this job,” said Mike Porcaro.
“I think it’s actually a benefit, since I have no entangling alliances. I have no preconceived ideas. And I’m learning and believe me I’m learning every day, just as most people do, what’s going on. And I’ve got some excellent teachers,” he said during his Senate Resources Committee confirmation hearing Wednesday.
Read MoreBob Griffin, who describes himself as “kind of a numbers-driven guy,” always coats his opinions with a steady stream of percentages, rankings, jargon and raw numbers, speaking with the complete authority you would expect from any long-time Alaska Airlines 737 captain.
Griffin, a campaign supporter and close ally of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, has been nominated by the governor for a second five-year term on the state school board. He faces a Senate Education Committee confirmation hearing Monday. His appointment will be among the many decided at a joint session of the Legislature in the next few weeks.
Read MoreThe Senate Resources Committee has set a confirmation hearing for radio talk show host and adman Mike Porcaro Wednesday at 3:30 p.m.
Porcaro, who has no experience in fisheries, was granted a state job as a fisheries commissioner by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Porcaro, who is in his mid 70s, has said he did not ask for the job.
Porcaro has been ill and an earlier confirmation hearing was canceled in early April.
Read More“Bach's Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was brought by Princess Daazhraii Johnson,” says Yo-Yo Ma, who traveled to Fairbanks last summer.
Read MoreThere is no doubt that Gov. Mike Dunleavy, state school board member Bob Griffin and others see the creation of statewide charter schools, which would act like correspondence schools, as a way to direct more public money into private schools.
Read MoreThe Alaska attorney general and his wife were involved in changing the policy of a former Anchorage charter school to pay for private school tuition in ways that haven’t been fully disclosed or examined.
Attorney general Tregarrick Taylor’s recusal on May 21, 2022 from the topic occurred many months after the Taylor lobbying campaign began. When Taylor recused himself, he created the impression that a column his wife had posted on May 16, 2022 was the first sign of her active engagement in pushing for public funds to be spent on private schools.
Read MorePerhaps 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 fulltime in a private school and try to enroll in a public correspondence school as well.
Other districts still grant public funds to pay for tuition, however, for fulltime private school students who enroll as public school correspondence students at the same time.
Read MoreAlaska school districts did not call it a voucher system for private schools, but that’s what some of them have created, using a system that a state judge has declared unconstitutional.
Few of the districts have spelled out the working details so clearly as the CyberLynx Homeschool & Correspondence Program based in Nenana and largely state funded.
It had about 1,500 students statewide in 2022-2023, according to the Alaska Policy Forum, which promotes using state funds for private tuition.
Read MoreAttorney General Tregarrick Taylor reinserted himself into the debate over using public funds for private schools, almost two years after his wife announced plans for she and her husband to seek $8,000 in state funds to pay most of the cost of private school tuition for two of their children.
He says his conflict of interest no longer exists, hinting that it is because his family is not longer seeking public funds to pay for private school tuition in Anchorage.
Read MoreOn 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.”
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreMountain 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.
Read MoreAn 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.”
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreAlaskans 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.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreDespite 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.
