Meet the star witness in the effort to stop Dunleavy's campaign of funding private schools with public money—Dunleavy
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s public declarations from a decade ago are a central part of the landmark school funding court case to be argued June 27 before the Alaska Supreme Court.
So much so that Sen. Mike Dunleavy is the equivalent of a star witness who directly contradicts the current declarations of Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor.
“Currently the Alaska Constitution prohibits the use of public funds for the direct benefit of any private educational institution. The courts have determined that this ban extends to state funds being allotted to individual Alaskans who choose to attend a private school,” Dunleavy wrote in 2013.
If the Alaska Supreme Court listens to what Sen. Mike Dunleavy claimed a decade ago, then Gov. Mike Dunleavy will lose his effort to funnel public funds to private schools and the Alaska Superior Court decision will be upheld.
On April 10, 2013 Sen. Mike Dunleavy said he knew it was illegal to allow public funds be used to pay tuition to allow a student to take even a single course in a private school.
“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,” he said, speaking to the Senate Education Committee. An ILP is an Individualized Learning Plan.
“Currently we cannot do that under the current constitutional language,” Dunleavy said.
To make his plan legal, Dunleavy said, the Alaska Constitution had to be amended. He tried 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.”
While the Dunleavy plan to allow public funds to go to a private schools was approved by the Legislature in 2014, Alaska lawmakers refused to advance Dunleavy’s idea of amending the Constitution to the voters to make it legal.
That meant the Dunleavy plan approved by the Legislature was illegal, according to Dunleavy. The Dunleavy plan was packaged into an omnibus education bill hastily approved on April 25, 2014, the last day of the legislative session.
As you might expect, the governor and his attorney general are doing everything they can now to claim the star witness was wrong about the Alaska Constitution.
Dunleavy has taken to recycling his old story about a student taking a single Latin course at Monroe, except he now has changed his opinion and says it is legal.
Appearing on public radio April 16, Dunleavy said of the Latin course anecdote: “Our argument is that it’s an indirect benefit to the institution, it’s not a direct benefit to the institution. And so what we’re talking about here is public school students, trying to get a public outcome, a public educational outcome, by using a whole host of different vendors, both private and religious.”
“In 2013, we had a discussion on that. I had a constitutional amendment to try and change that. There was no appetite for that in the Legislature, so that was dropped. That was left behind,” he said.
“If you buy a Latin course, you have a single mom, let’s say, two kids, you live a block away from Monroe Catholic, you buy a Catholic, excuse me, a Latin course from that institution. Does that constitute a direct benefit to the institution? Is that the purpose? Or does that constitute an indirect benefit and the purpose is to help that child learn Latin. That’s the question.”
The argument about direct or indirect benefits, an old one, has been dealt with by the Alaska Supreme Court in a 1979 ruling deciding that tuition grants to private colleges are unconstitutional.
The court said, “we have no difficulty in concluding that the tuition grant program is in its effect a direct benefit to private educational institutions and therefore violates article VII, section 1 of our Constitution.”
The state tried during the lower court proceedings to say that Dunleavy’s opinions a decade ago were irrelevant.
The state has also tried to say that while Dunleavy’s comments were irrelevant, he did make a handful of statements that “suggest he believed that public funding for even a single private school class would violate the Constitution.”
Dunleavy did more than suggest. He said it would violate the Alaska Constitution, an argument that is part of the legal argument before the Supreme Court.
The attorney general is now denying that Dunleavy said what Dunleavy said.
In April, Taylor claimed, contrary to legislative recordings and to documents created by his department, that Dunleavy did not say a decade ago that a constitutional amendment was needed to legalize spending public funds at private and other religious schools.
“I think that’s a mischaracterization of the record. I think if you look at the full record in the Legislature when the governor was a senator you’ll find that is a misrepresentation of what occurred. And also a misrepresentation of what was presented at that time and what actually became law,” Taylor claimed, refusing to provide specifics.
The only mischaracterization of the record here is by Taylor.
Taylor is misrepresenting what the star witness claimed on multiple occasions in 2013-2014.
That the Taylor press conference claim was bogus is borne out by his decision to not repeat it in the legal document filed with the Supreme Court by the state. The state chose instead to make the much weaker claim that Dunleavy and others said that the “constitutionality of different types of student allotment spending was undecided.”
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