On Thursday, the Alaska Supreme Court will hear a case centering on how families in the state spend what are known as student allotments.
While both sides of the case say the outcome will be important for Alaska students, to truly understand what allotments are, it is useful to closely examine the long history of allotments in the state.
Above all, a student allotment is an amount of money that the state allows families who choose to educate their children at home to spend on that education.
In April, a ruling by a Superior Court judge threw out a state law governing homeschool allotments. Judge Adolf Zeman ruled that the law, which allowed families to spend allotments on private or religious education, was unconstitutional. The Alaska Constitution says that no money from public funds may directly benefit a religious or private educational institution.
The state appealed the ruling. The outcome could affect the families of nearly 23,000 correspondence school students in the state, who are each eligible for up to roughly $4,000 a year in state education money.
Supporters of the law say that parents should choose the education model that best fits the needs of their child, regardless of whether it is public or private. This parallels arguments in favor of “school choice,” which is policy or programs that allow families to use public dollars to access educational options beyond their local school.
Detractors say that allowing allotments to be spent on private and religious instruction, such as private school tuition, undermines the public school system by siphoning money elsewhere. Allotments in their current form have been called a shadow voucher program, an allusion to programs that give families taxpayer dollars to send their children to private schools.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has made school choice a priority in elected office — from the change to state statute that allows homeschool parents to spend state money on private and religious instruction in 2014 that is at the core of the lawsuit and its upcoming appeal, to an attempt to allow the state’s Board of Education to certify charter schools just this year. He declared a week of last January “School Choice Week.”
Now, his administration is taking that support to the state Supreme Court.
A brief history of the correspondence allotment
Alaska’s correspondence schools date back to territorial days and parents of children enrolled in correspondence schools have been reimbursed by the state for education materials for decades.
Back then, students in remote areas without nearby schools would complete their education by mail, sending assignments to be graded by teachers in the state’s cities. It is likely for this reason that officials with the state’s education department say the terms “homeschool” and correspondence” are used roughly interchangeably.
Now the correspondence school program is used widely by families who live in the state’s urban areas, even though they have easy access to public schools.
And reimbursements have gone from an adaptation for families who have no school options to a flashpoint in broader national conversation about school choice.
Today, parents whose children enroll in the state’s correspondence programs may still be reimbursed for what they pay for educational materials. But what families may be reimbursed for has been contested at various points over more than 20 years.
The reimbursements for homeschool parents have been called allotments since at least 2003. Their use — and alleged abuse — has been documented since that time.
Then, Anchorage Daily News reporter Katie Pesznecker followed a story similar to the one Alaskans are viewing through the lens of the lawsuit over how those allotments may be spent. Her reporting detailed how Alaska families spent allotments on water park passes, horseback riding lessons and vacations, among other uses that prompted public outcry.
The education commissioner at the time, Roger Sampson, told correspondence programs they could voluntarily crack down on the spending or accept reforms. The late former Sen. Lyda Green, R-Wasilla, reportedly said: “If we’re going to do (vouchers), let’s do it, and if we’re not, let’s make it straight.”
So they did. Under Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski, the state determined that there had been rampant misspending of state education money and implemented comprehensive regulations.
But opponents of the regulations argued that families should have leeway to tailor their childrens’ education. The rules were in place until then-Sen. Dunleavy’s 2014 bill wrote them out of statute.
His legislation became the current law governing correspondence allotments as we know them. It allowed families to spend the money on private and religious instruction. It eliminated regulations that governed the spending and put that responsibility on districts. The law increased the amount of money the state would spend per pupil on correspondence students. It also let the money stay with the family — any unspent funds roll over to the next year.
“That’s actually the story of this case,” said attorney for the plaintiffs, Scott Kendall. “We had allotments, and they were closely monitored. DEED tracked them, and DEED made sure that unconstitutional spending didn’t happen. The 2014 legislation passes and strips that authority away from DEED and voids all of those regulations. Now there are no regulations.”
And he said the lack of regulations has emboldened Alaskans to misspend state money again.
The backdrop for the court case is a hot debate over whether Alaska’s public schools are adequately funded. Districts say they are struggling to keep music and advanced classes or pay teachers enough to keep them. Opponents of increased funding say districts have enough money but need to improve their budgeting.
Vouchers, a point of comparison
Vouchers are generally understood to be public education funds that are given to families who may use them to educate their children at private schools.
Michael Petrilli, a national education analyst and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group, called them a “close cousin” of Alaska’s current correspondence allotment system.
Dunleavy has sought to highlight the difference between the two, which is that Alaska’s allotments are not state money that goes directly to private schools, but state money that goes to the public correspondence system. The state’s appeal filing says its responsibility for the money stops with the district.
“Our case has always been that we understand that you cannot directly fund, like they do in Indiana, right from the state treasury, a voucher system to a private school. We had that discussion back in 2012, 2013,” he said in a May news conference about the state’s appeal. He said the state’s position has always been that these are not direct payments to private institutions, but indirect payments.
In his words, a major difference is that the public money is first distributed by a program within the public school system before it is spent on the private education of certain students. These students are enrolled in a public system, even if they get their education in a private one.
Vouchers were first introduced about 30 years ago in Milwaukee and aimed at low-income families to reduce educational outcome disparities, according to Petrilli.
He said the idea spread, but voucher popularity somewhat plateaued until the last 5-10 years. “The school choice groups decided that they would adopt a new strategy, which is to really focus on red states and on voucher programs that might appeal more to Republican legislators and Republican voters,” he said. “Instead of just focusing narrowly on low-income kids and kids of color who weren’t necessarily their constituents, they would go after these universal programs and say, ‘We’re going to provide private school choice scholarships to everybody, regardless of income.’”
That idea has taken off in recent years and roughly a dozen states have voucher programs.
Alaska has opted against vouchers.
Allotments are different because they pass through the school district before going to families. They are only available to families who elect to pull their children out of public school classrooms. Currently, the Dunleavy administration argues these students are still public school students because of their enrollment in the public correspondence programs.
Petrilli said he is in favor of school choice, but he doesn’t think universal vouchers work well.
“I am more of a fan of charter schools, because charter schools in most places have a much stronger track record of success,” he said, pointing to poorer test scores and outcomes in voucher programs. Homeschool families do not have to take standardized tests in Alaska, so measuring the success of allotments would be difficult here.
Private school, power tools, air fryer
The lack of regulations on Alaska’s correspondence vouchers has led to spending that looks much like that documented 20 years ago that spurred the regulations in the first place.
On the Facebook page Alaskan Homeschoolers, families discussed their purchases in a thread about the “coolest thing” they had bought for educational purposes that was reimbursed with state education money. Responses included an air fryer, keyboard, beehive, backpacking gear and a chop saw. When one parent asked if they had to return the items eventually, another responded that they had called the district correspondence school to check: “No we do not have to give it back to the school. Whew,” they wrote.
Jodi Taylor, board chair for the conservative state policy organization Alaska Policy Forum and wife of Attorney General Treg Taylor, wrote an article on the organization’s website in 2022 detailing a step-by-step guide for how families can use a correspondence school allotment to pay for classes at private schools.
Anchorage’s largest private K-12 school, Mountain City Christian Academy, automatically enrolls all its students in the correspondence program Denali PEAK to take advantage of $3,000 in public education dollars the program offers. This was first reported by political writer Dermot Cole. Parents may opt out of the state correspondence program if they wish. Tuition can be more than $9,000 per year.
“What we’ve seen is not only the paying for tuition at private schools,” Kendall said, “but the evidence of families buying vacations. A family bought a beekeeping kit, a family bought power tools, another family bought an appliance. Someone’s like, ‘Oh, I bought an air fryer for my kid for Home Ec, and then we just kept it.’ So, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of insane.”
State regulation prior to 2014 did not allow families to keep such purchases.
Kendall said the part that makes him sad or angry is that such spending gets counted as public school spending in the state budget.
“When someone buys a power tool or sends their kid overtly to private school, and yet it’s being counted against the public school system that they say is bloated — to me actually that makes me a bit angry, because that’s beyond disingenuous,” he said. “That’s just a lie.”
But where Kendall sees a flaw, Dunleavy sees a feature.
“When you’re talking about vouchers, that’s public money going to a private school, and those kids that may have been in public schools leave and go to their private school, and they’re no longer public school kids,” Dunleavy said in a May press conference.
“Here in Alaska, this is all public education. Those kids that may not have been in public school, because of the program, joined public school, are going to public school. It’s the only model like it that I can see in the country. And the plaintiffs are trying to kill it.”
The Alaska Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the appeal case on Thursday, June 27, at 10 a.m.
• Claire Stremple is a reporter based in Juneau who got her start in public radio at KHNS in Haines, and then on the health and environment beat at KTOO in Juneau. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government. Alaska Beacon reporter James Brooks contributed reporting to this story.
