Public funds for private school tuition benefit families only, not schools, lawyers claim
Just one more blog post, for the moment, on the school funding appeal to be heard by the Alaska Supreme Court Thursday at 10 a.m. Gavel to Gavel plans to cover it live.
But home school parents who intervened in the case—represented by the Institute for Justice in Texas and Virginia, and former Attorney General Craig Richards—claim they have a right to receive public funds to pay tuition at private schools.
In January 2023, the lawyers filed affidavits from parents who used public funds, about $4,000 per child, from the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School to pay about half the tuition to attend Holy Rosary Academy and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton School in Anchorage.
The lawyers said the money goes to “nonsectarian educational programs.” (A church school can’t exclude religious teaching from any part of its daily operations, so there is an inherent contradiction in claims that some courses have nothing to do with the values inherent in the religion.)
But the process described in those documents did not continue in the same manner.
A year ago the Anchorage School District took over the Anchorage Family Partnership Charter School because of management issues and made it a correspondence school. Afterwards, it “learned of use of allotments that do not comply with the Alaska Constitution,” the district said.
“As a government entity, ASD cannot allow the unconstitutional use of allotments and is now taking action to correct the problem,” the district said.
The Anchorage School District says that no portion of an allotment can be used to pay for tuition for students who are enrolled fulltime in private schools. Allotments can be used for part-time enrollment tuition at private schools, the district says, and in other ways,
The family of Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor planned to use the allotments to pay for a majority of tuition costs at Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the practice that the Anchorage school district says is unconstitutional.
Jessica Parker, who had been the Family Partnership principal, is now the superintendent at the Mountain City Christian Academy, the private school that enrolls all of its students in the Denali Borough correspondence program to receive $3,000 allotments.
Mountain City Church, which adopted that name to get away from the word temple, runs what is now called the Mountain City Christian Academy, formerly the Anchorage Christian School run by the former Anchorage Baptist Temple.
Meanwhile, a second major change was that the Catholic schools saw a problem as well with public money for private tuition.
On March 6, 2023, Lumen Christi Principal Brian Ross and the Rev. Tom Lilly released a detailed memo on the issue, saying the Archdiocese had released guidance “discouraging the use of public correspondence school allotment funds for tuition purposes.”
The guidance from the Archdiocese “does clarify that allotment funds can be used for other extracurricular activities at diocesan schools pending the lawsuit by the NEA,” Ross and Lilly wrote.
Families could also use allotments on expenses outside of the school on anything from computers to art and music lessons and private tutoring, they said.
The Institute for Justice, which claims to be the “nation’s preeminent courtroom defender of educational choice programs,” says the allotments are a direct benefit to families, not to private schools, so there is no constitutional violation.
In the Superior Court case, the lawyers compared the situation to food stamps.
“When a state government creates a program that grants struggling people a monthly allowance for food, no one views that program as a direct benefit to Fred Meyer, Wal-Mart or any other store,” the Institute for Justice and Richards claimed.
Once enrolled in the program, the family can use the money for private school courses, or other activities such as Taekwondo or piano lessons. They can also enroll in a private school.
The state doesn’t control where the money goes, the families do. “The program thus does not ‘directly benefit’ private schools,” the attorneys claim. Therefore, it complies with the Alaska Constitution, they assert.
The lawyers go further, claiming that the Superior Court decision violates the federal constitutional rights of the parents who get state funds under the program. Here is their brief to the Supreme Court.
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