Advocates of Alaska’s public homeschooling programs, which serve more than 23,000 students, are raising the alarm about Senate Bill 277. Introduced by the Democrat-controlled Senate Education Committee, the bill redirects critical funding away from innovative, parent-led education and toward traditional brick-and-mortar schools, thereby threatening school-choice programs that enable Alaska families to opt their children out of failing standard government schools.
SB 277 fundamentally alters how correspondence students are counted for state funding. Instead of the money following each student to the statewide correspondence program that they actually attend (such as IDEA, Raven and others), the proposed bill assigns those students to the school district where the family lives – specifically, schools with the lowest enrollment numbers in that district. This redirection strips resources away from successful statewide school choice programs and funnels money to standard schools, which many families have deliberately rejected.
“Correspondence programs like IDEA and Raven have empowered Alaska parents to tailor education to their children’s needs and reject centralized, Common Core-style standards with minimal bureaucracy,” said Barbara Haney, founder of Alaskans Against Common Core. “SB 277 dismantles the financial model that makes these programs possible.”
She added that families who choose flexibility and personalization are now being punished to prop up declining conventional schools.
“This is not education reform – it’s an attack on parental rights and another step toward the centralized control we have fought for over a decade,” Haney stated.
The bill also doubles the administrative fee districts can skim from charter school budgets, raising the cap from 4% to 8%. Many charter schools operate with homeschool-like flexibility and serve families seeking alternatives to standardized education. Less money reaching charter schools means fewer resources, larger classes, or program cuts.
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
While the bill includes a modest increase in the Base Student Allocation and allows students to keep curriculum materials when they leave a program, Haney maintains that these “minor concessions” do not offset the structural damage.
“The net effect is a clear shift away from Alaska’s nationally recognized model of educational freedom toward centralized, traditional schooling that limits parental authority,” she emphasized.
Alaskans Against Common Core has long warned against centralized education policies and the group is now calling on the Senate Education Committee to reject SB 277 in its current form.
TAKING ACTION
— Click here to read SB 277.
— To contact members of the Senate Education Committee, click here.
11 Comments
The Democrat Party and Public Education (steered by teacher unions) feed off of each other. It’s basically just a big money cycle: Democrat politicians pass bills to provide funding to (failing) public schools; unions provide money to Democrat candidates to get elected. The system is corrupt.
It’s worse than that. Insert this into the cycle you described: Government run (“public” education) schools do not exist to educate future citizens but to indoctrinate into the minds future voters fealty to said government.
It is not just the democrat party involved in this. There are senate republicans supporting the democrat’s push on these bills that take money away from the homeschools. I am pretty sure you could find some republicans in the AK Leg House working with democrats to keep the money flowing into the schools.
“but comments will be limited to “invitation only.”
In other words- we don’t want the public (government employers) to have any say in the matter. I’m waiting for the day when big box hardware stores are sold out of large wood chippers.
What concerns do advocates of Alaska’s public homeschooling programs have about Senate Bill 277?
How is it that these people think they are going to tell us that we have to send OUR CHILDREN into their DEVIL’S DEN SHOOLS where they can push sex changes for kids, homosexuality, and adult sex with minors? These so called representatives are not representing my values and they should take a long walk off of a short dock. I wonder how far the public will go in allowing these absurd dipsticks to occupy positions of anything more than dog catcher???? Oh the poor dogs! What would they do to them!
It’s blowing up! Making Iran look like it is thriving!
I removed my child from public school last year—not because we wanted to leave, but because the system left him behind.
They called me every day, but never with solutions. I was spending 2–3 hours a day sitting in his classroom trying to help him keep up, and eventually I realized something had to change. It became clear that I could either keep fighting a system that wasn’t working for him, or I could take responsibility for his education myself.
At the time, he was in 3rd grade and still couldn’t do basic math. They just kept moving him forward without giving him the foundation he needed. But how can a child build anything without a foundation?
Since bringing him home, everything has changed. He is now reading at a 5th grade level. We went all the way back to 1st grade math—not because he failed, but because the system failed to teach him properly—and now he’s finally building real skills and confidence.
And here’s the reality: I didn’t choose homeschooling because it was convenient. I’m a business owner. This decision disrupted my work, my schedule, and our entire routine. But in Alaska, more and more families are making this same choice. Homeschooling has been steadily growing across the state, and studies consistently show that homeschooled students often perform at or above grade level and develop stronger independence and critical thinking skills.
This wasn’t about preference—it was about necessity. It was the sacrifice we were forced to make to give our son the education he deserves.
Amanda Bonilla-Lee, Your son will reap the rewards of having parents who saw a problem and addressed it head on. Fortunately he will also benefit from you having done it sooner rather than later when it may have been more difficult to undo the damage of a failing public education system.
I was enrolled in the old Centralized Correspondence Study, taking my HS diploma in January of 1987. I had graduated six months ahead of my peers at Chugiak High, and was serving as a page to the Alaska State Senate. I remember two things. First, the Anchorage School District paid 10k per year to educate each student. Secondly, the CCS Superintendent telling us at the Alaska Academic Decathlon in Fairbanks that ASD did not field a team because they were “arrogant and difficult to work with.” I was singled out at statewide student government conferences for my education choices. They called me everything but a dropout, probably for fear of lawsuits. Second, 80% of CCS enrollment came from within the boundaries of the ASD. That means with a total enrollment of 840 in the 1985-86 school year, for which data were available, roughly 650 of us cost the District 6.5 million a year in appropriations they could not claim. Parents, these systematic efforts to undermine public educational choice are nothing new. Keep at it.
The government run schools are nothing more than indoctrination camps.