State attorneys admit school districts might be violating Alaska Constitution by allowing private school tuition payments, but AG allows them to continue

In the myriad of conflicting and contradictory claims made by the Dunleavy administration over using public funds for private schools, one that stands out is the admission by the state that school districts may be violating the Alaska Constitution by allowing students to pay for private-school tuition with public money.

But the law that allows them to do this should be upheld because the law doesn’t require unconstitutional spending, the state claims.

Violations of the constitution should prompt action by the attorney general to force the school districts to stop, but AG Tregarrick Taylor has allowed it to go on. He is seriously conflicted over the issue.

Taylor’s wife, Jodi Taylor, announced in 2022 that she and her husband wanted $8,000 from the state to pay for private school tuition for two of their kids in Anchorage. Jodi Taylor praised the legislative work of Mike Dunleavy a decade ago for allowing her family to get public money for private schools.

Jodi Taylor successfully lobbied an Anchorage charter school, which was a public school, to change its rules to allow her family and others to use state money for private school tuition. Her husband’s name came up in a school committe meeting and the group wanted to seek his guidance.

Eventually, in the spring of 2022, the charter school academic committee adopted a new rule saying that public funds from the student allotment, $4,000 for an elementary school student, could be used to pay private school fees.

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.

Alaska news organizations have not reported on how the Taylors helped engineer the change at the Anchorage Family Partenership Charter School. The Anchorage School District later turned the charter school into a correspondence school. Among the issues, the district “learned of use of allotments that do not comply with the Alaska Constitution,” which included the practice proposed by the attorney general’s family.

Later on, the private school the Taylors had their children attending—St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Anchorage—was ordered by the Catholic Diocese of Juneau and Anchorage not to accept public funds for tuition. It was this reversal by the diocese that appears to have prompted Taylor to conclude that he no longer has a conflict of interest.

Taylor made that announcement in April, but refused to release details of why he says he no longer has a conflict.

The Alaska Supreme Court takes up the landmark case Thursday morning.

Here’s the thing: The 2022 Taylor plan to use public funds to pay for private school tuition is not legal, according to attorneys in the AG’s office who are not named Taylor.

In one of its court filings, the attorney general’s office says, “True, a school district could violate Article VII, Section I by allowing a parent to spend student allotment funds on full-time private school tuition, but this would be contrary to statute as well as the constitution.”

In 2022, during the time when Taylor recused himself from the topic, his department released an opinion saying it is “almost certainly unconstitutional” to use public funds to pay for most or all of private school tuition.

The Taylor plan called for using public school funds to pay two-thirds of the cost of tuition at the private school for the attorney general’s children.

Now some public school districts in Alaska and some private schools have adopted the Taylor plan. The Dunleavy administration has looked the other way. The state claims that if anything unconstitutional is happening, the school districts are to blame because the law pushed by Dunleavy bans the state from oversight.

In one of its court filings, the attorney general’s office claims that the law allowing the use of public funds for private schools is constitutional because the law can be applied without violating the Alaska Constitution and nothing in the law requires school districts to approve unconstitutional spending.

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