As expected, the battle has resumed over whether Alaska’s growing homeschool population can utilize state-funded correspondence programs to access educational goods and services provided at private and religious entities.
Last summer, the Alaska Supreme Court rejected a challenge to this practice that was spearheaded by the powerful NEA-Alaska teachers union. While the high court’s June 2024 decision in favor of the state preserved the status quo and gave homeschool families and schools a level of stability during the current school year, all parties knew the battle was far from over.
Last week, plaintiffs renewed the battle with a modified case filed in Anchorage District Court. The case now names four school districts, claiming they approved unconstitutional uses of the homeschool funds. The named districts are Anchorage, Mat-Su, Denali Borough and Galena City.
Now that the case has been refiled, a high-stakes battle over the future of the state’s homeschool allotment program is set to play out, with the educational future of roughly 23,000 children at stake.
In issuing their decision last July, the Alaska Supreme Court rejected a lower court opinion that claimed the entire homeschool allotment program should be discarded because some families use the allotments to provide their children with educational opportunities provided by private and religious schools.
That lower-court finding was based on the belief that it was unconstitutional to spend public funds at private or religious educational intuitions or organizations, since the Alaska Constitution forbids the use of public funds to “directly benefit” these entities.
Attorney Kirby West, arguing on behalf of homeschool families, made the case that the allotments only “indirectly” benefited private and religious schools, since the money is given to the parents, who could have spent the funds in myriad ways. The fact that some money was spent on private schools only provides an indirect benefit to these institutions, she maintained. She compared it to parents who might choose to spend some of their Permanent Fund Dividend dollars this way.
While the Supreme Court declined to rule on the constitutionality of using the allotments in this manner, it did declare that the lower court was wrong to strike down the allotment program in its entirety based on the belief that some applications might be unconstitutional.
Additionally, the high court noted that all parties seem to agree that homeschool funds could be used on private martial arts classes, gym memberships and pottery courses, and myriad other costs associated with private businesses.
The court declined, however, to rule on the more fundamental question of whether the Alaska Constitution permits spending allotment funds at private or religious educational institutions – a question both homeschool families and the plaintiffs want resolved.
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Ultimately, the Alaska Supreme Court declined to rule on whether individual school districts were approving specific instances of unconstitutional uses of the allotments, because the plaintiffs had failed to name any districts as defendants in the initial lawsuit.
The court said it cannot rule against a party that is not even involved in the lawsuit, and remanded the case back to the superior court, saying that the question of whether school districts can approve allotment reimbursement funds for money spent at private or religious schools must first be argued in the lower court.
Now that the case has been refiled, a high-stakes battle over the future of the state’s homeschool allotment program is set to play out, with the educational fate of roughly 23,000 children at stake. The current school year is not affected.
2 Comments
Seems like they should remind themselves that the United States now ranks 40th of the developed nations in education and Alaska is close if not the bottom of the 50 States, while we pay the most per student, maybe they should center on fixing their system before worrying about, those who opted out, because their system is broken.
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the dissolution of civil
government.”
People
U.
Ruggles, 8 Johns. R. 290 (Sup. Ct. N.Y. 1811).
Speaking for a unanimous Court, Justice David Brewer, quoting Chancellor Kent’s Ruggles decision along with a host of other evidence of America’s Christian foundations, concluded that “[t]hese, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457, 471 (1892). See Appendix A for an extended quotation from the Holy Trinity opinion.
Likewise, Supreme Court Justice and Harvard Professor Joseph Story (1779-1845), wrote in his influential Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833):
Probably at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the amendment to it now under consideration, the general, if not the universal sentiment was, that Christianity ought
to receive
encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private right of conscience and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.
Crop
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The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects,
and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. 10
Acknowledgement of the formative role of Christianity upon American laws and institutions is entirely consistent with the Establishment Clause of the
First Amendment. In
1853, when the
constitutionality of the congressional chaplaincy was questioned, the Senate Judiciary Committee undertook an exhaustive study of the background and meaning of the Establishment Clause. The Committee concluded in part:
The clause speaks of “an establishment of religion.”
What is
meant by that
expression? It referred, without doubt, to that establishment which existed in the mother country, its meaning is to be ascertained by ascertaining what that establishment was. It was the connection with the state of a particular religious society, by its endowment, at the public expense, in exclusion of, or in preference to, any other, by giving to its members exclusive political rights, and by compelling
Unile States Slar, Comestaries on the Constitution of the.
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the attendance of those who rejected its communion upon its worship, or religious observances. These three particulars constituted that union of church and state of which our ancestors were so justly jealous, and against which they so wisely and carefully provided.
Our fathers were true lovers of liberty, and utterly opposed to any constraint upon the rights of conscience. They intended, by this amendment, to prohibit “an establishment of religion” such as the English church presented, or anything like it. But they had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us an irreligious people; they did not intend to prohibit a just expression of religious devotion by the legislators of the nation, even in their public character as legislators; they did not intend to send our armies and navies forth to do battle for their country without any national recognition of that God on whom success or failure depends; they did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and the whole public action of the nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistical apathy. Not so had the battles of the revolution been fought, and the deliberations of the revolutionary Congress conducted. On the contrary, all had been done with a continual appeal to the Supreme Ruler of the world, and an
habitual reliance upon His protection of the righteous cause which they commended to His care.11
The same year the House Judiciary Committee conducted a similar study and came to the same conclusion.
What is an establishment of religion? It must have a creed, defining what a man must believe; it must have rites and ordinances, which believers must observe; it must have ministers of defined
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-18/56143/20180801124326382_18-18%20FML%20Bladensburg%20amicus.pdf