If you aren’t reading the Alaska Beacon for its coverage of Alaska politics, you should.

The latest important story brought into the spotlight by the nonprofit news organization finds the state examining the ban in the Alaska Constitution on using public money for private schools to see if there is a legal way around it.

The Constitution says that “No money shall be paid from public funds for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”

The attorney general’s office is reviewing the matter as the Department of Education questions the legality of loopholes backed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy now and back when he was a legislator.

What’s more alarming than the attempt to circumvent the language of the Alaska Constitution is that Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor has a conflict of interest that should disqualify him from touching the topic.

Taylor’s wife, Jodi Taylor, the board president of the right-wing Alaska Policy Forum, is one of the big advocates of using public funds for private schools. They have six children.

“In 2014, educator and then-Sen. Mike Dunleavy sponsored and carried to passage a statute that allows a parent or guardian of a correspondence study program student to use the student’s education allotment funded from the BSA (Base Student Allocation) to pay for classes at private schools, in addition to many other choices for accessing education. Fortunately for every parent and child stricken by COVID school restrictions, Governor Dunleavy recognizes that families are craving educational options. The guiding principle is that families have the right to determine where and how their children are educated,” Jodi Taylor wrote in a press release printed by various news organizations.

She said she wants $8,000 from the state to reimburse her family for correspondence study.

The editor’s note attached to her press release did not mention that her husband is the attorney general.

Treg Taylor has a vested interest in this matter and it is not just the $8,000 a year his family wants from the state.

We know he agrees with his wife on this based on the political statements he made years ago as an unsuccessful right-wing candidate for local government offices in Anchorage.

In 2016, when running for the Anchorage assembly, Taylor had a campaign song and posed for a photo with a campaign sign that said he was “the only South Anchorage candidate that owns a gun!”

Running for the school board in 2011, Treg Taylor complained about the cost of public schools, objected to tenure for teachers and building “museum-like schools.”

At the time, Taylor was an attorney in private practice for McKinley Capital Management, Bob Gillam’s company.

"If you look at the goal to provide the best education for children, you can't support tenure," Taylor said, the Anchorage Daily News reported at the time. "It's just unacceptable to have bad teachers."

“Taylor's two elementary-school aged children attend Northern Lights ABC School, a public alternative school, and he supports alternative and charter schools. He said he supports the idea of vouchers, too, in which parents could spend public money on private schools.”

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