AG's wife lobbied former Anchorage charter school to change rules to subsidize private school tuition
The 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.
But on September 13, 2021, Jodi Taylor was one of two parents who appealed to the board that governed the former Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School for a change in policy to allow public funds to be spent reimbursing parents for private school tuition.
Taylor said her children had been in public schools,
The minutes of the Academic Policy Committee meeting, say that Karin Owens and Jodi Taylor brought up the topic of using public funds for private school tuition. The committee voted to add this topic to the agenda for discussion.
The minutes say that under new business, the committee had a “discussion about changing our charter in regards to opening up funds for private schools.”
The minutes contain this reference to getting legal advice from the attorney general on this question: “Can Jody’s husband back up the assertion that allowing students to go to these schools are valid” and “Can we change our charter to allow for giving discretion for this?”
Minutes from the September 13, 2021 meeting of the Academic Policy Committee of the former Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School in which Jodi Taylor, wife of the attorney general, made a pitch for using public funds to pay for their children’s private school tuition.
The charter school, a public school, included this prohibition in its organizational document setting up the rules for its operation: “The use of public funds for private school tuition is prohibited.”
In its 2022 charter renewal application, the committee added the words, “individual courses from private vendors are allowable.”
On May 9, 2022, the committee running the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School adopted new language on “using student allotment for private schools.”
The new rule said the use of public funds from the student allotment, $4,000 for an elementary school student, was acceptable for “non-sectarian courses at private schools as is consistent with applicable law, ASD policies and regulations to which FPCS must comply and any other conditions as deemed acceptable to the APC.”
A week later Jodi Taylor published her column saying that her family would use public funds from the Anchorage School District to reimburse themselves for tuition at the private Catholic School. Her two youngest children were full-time students at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton school.
A year ago, the Anchorage School District took over the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School because of management issues. The district said it ”learned of use of allotments that do not comply with the Alaska Constitution,” which included the practice proposed by the attorney general’s family.
AG Taylor now says “the situation with my kids’ schooling has changed significantly,” but won’t provide details as to why he has ended his two-year recusal from the topic.
I mentioned here the other day that one big change is that the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School, which would have provided the $8,000 in public funds to the Taylors, no longer exists. And the Anchorage School District says it is unconstitutional to give public funds to families who have their kids in private school full time.
Other districts are still allowing tuition payments to families whose children go to private school full time. But the Dunleavy administration has taken a hands-off approach on all of this.
A second big change is that St. Elizabeth Ann Seton elementary school is in the Catholic Archdiocese of Anchorage-Juneau, which is now “discouraging the use of public correspondence school allotment funds for tuition purposes” for Catholic schools.
A third big change is that an Anchorage Superior Court judge has determined that the state laws dealing with the allotments are unconstitutional because the Alaska Constitution forbids using public funds to benefit private educational institutions.
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