AG Taylor's family advertised plan to get $8,000 private school tuition subsidy; Deputy AG says it's unconstitutional to get state funds to cover most or all private tuition

In May 2022, the wife of Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor said she would seek $8,000 in public funds from the Family Partnership Charter School in Anchorage to subsidize their children’s tuition at a private school in Anchorage.

“My two youngest school-age children attend St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (SEAS) private school. They attend full time and are also enrolled in the Anchorage School District’s Family Partnership Charter School (FPCS),” wrote right-wing activist Jodi Taylor, who was chair of the Alaska Policy Forum board.

“Next year, I will request that FPCS use funds in our correspondence study program annual student allotment to reimburse our family up to $4,000 for each of our children,” she wrote.

The practice of using state funds this way came about because of a bill Mike Dunleavy backed a decade ago when he was a state senator.

But a companion measure to amend the Alaska Constitution, SJR 9, and make this sort of thing legal, was never approved.

Dunleavy’s attempt to put an amendment before the voters failed.

The Dunleavy amendment would have removed language from the Alaska Constitution that prohibits spending public funds to benefit private schools.

“The courts have determined that this ban (on spending public funds for private schools) extends to state funds being allotted to individual Alaskans who choose to attend a private school,” Dunleavy said on March 15, 2013.

Dunleavy testified on April 10, 2013, “Currently we cannot do that under the current constitutional language.”

The Legislature approved the law change and the state went ahead anyway, allowing an allotment of funds for a correspondence program with private institutions, despite the dubious legal foundation.

In 2022, Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor said he recused himself from consideration of the constitutional questions about spending state money on private schools, given his family’s bid for a state subsidy for private schooling.

His department released a legal opinion July 25, 2022 that said it is almost certainly unconstitutional to use state funds to pay most or all of the cost of tuition at a private school.

Jodi Taylor and AG Tregarrick Taylor advertised throughout Alaska that they sought to have the state pay two-thirds of the cost of private tuition, which qualifies as “most” by any standard.

“Using public correspondence school allotments to pay most or all of a private educational institiution’s tuition is almost certainly unconstitutional,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Cori Mills, in an opinion dated July 22, 2022.

“Spending public funds in this manner would appear to violate the plain language of the constitutional prohibition agains using public funds to pay for a direct benefit to a private school,” she wrote.

On January 24, 2023, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of using state funds to reimburse parents for private school tuition was filed.

The lawsuit mentions the opinion column from the wife of the attorney general and the steps needed to get money from the state for private schools. “This approach is only possible because, under AS 14.03.310, correspondence study program funds may be used to purchase services from approved vendors, including private schools,” the lawsuit says.

There is much more to be said about this lawsuit and I will get to that in later days.

The main reason I brought all of this up today is to draw what seems to be the obvious connection between the fate of the Family Partnership Charter School—which was to be the public-funded entity providing the $8,000 annual tuition subsidy for the Taylors and the charter school power grab being pushed in Juneau by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

The Family Partnership Charter School lost its charter from the Anchorage School District in 2023—not because of the lawsuit challenging the funneling of money through correspondence programs to private schools—but because the charter school’s leadership was dysfunctional.

In a 6-1 vote, the school district took control of the home school program. It is now the Family Partnership Correspondence School.

Here is a detailed account from the Anchorage School District on what went wrong with the charter school and its Academic Policy Committee.

Charter schools are governed and managed by an Academic Policy Committee that hires the school administration. The Family Partnership committee was engaged in constant family feuds.

The school district said:

“The Family Partnership APC has a history of breaching its charter with ASD. During the 2018-2019 school year, the APC approved bypassing the principal in the curriculum approval process, even though the charter required principal approval of all curriculum. Upon investigation and as a result of this lack of administrative oversight, ASD learned that curriculum that was religious in nature was among the curriculum purchased with public dollars, which was a violation of federal and state law. That same school year, the APC breached the charter by having APC members who were teaching staff at Family Partnership participate in the annual evaluation of the principal, even though those members are subordinate employees of the principal and a violation of ASD Administrative Regulation 6181(h). During the 2020-2021 school year, the APC breached the charter by again allowing an APC member who was teaching staff to participate in the annual evaluation of the principal.”

“Members of the APC are engaged in constant infighting and bad-faith conduct with one another. A review of the APC’s 2022-2023 school-year meetings publicly available online shows a complete breakdown in the proper functioning of a charter school Academic Policy Committee. APC members have filed complaints against one another, alleging unprofessional behavior and violations of the code of ethics. An investigated member is stripped of his or her ability to vote on any matter before the APC, providing an incentive for different factions to level charges against one another. Only on rare occasion does the APC discuss matters relevant to the governance of the school. The vast majority of the APC’s time is spent prosecuting internal disputes,” the Anchorage School District found.

The only vote to keep the school as a charter school was by school board member Dave Donley, a longtime state bureaucrat, now the deputy commissioner of administration in the Dunleavy administration.

I would not be surprised if the Anchorage decision to revamp the charter school into an Anchorage School District operation was the prime motivating factor behind the Dunleavy push to give the governor-appointed state school board far more power in determining the future of Alaska charter schools. Giving more power to the state means taking power away from local school boards.

The Dunleavy appointees on the state school board would not have revoked the charter of the Family Partnership Charter School.

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