Alaska Supreme Court sides with state, allows correspondence school laws to stand

The Alaska Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling that threw the future of homeschooling in Alaska into question. , Alaska’s highest court unanimously sided with the state Friday in a case that challenged laws around cash payments to homeschool families, known as allotments. A superior court judgethat because some families were allowed to spend their allotments on private school classes, the laws violated a constitutional prohibition on using state funds at private schools.

The court said plaintiffs in the case had failed to show that a 2014 law reforming the state’s correspondence school system violated the state Constitution. It said that because there are a range of permissible uses for allotment funds, the parents who sued to throw out the law had not met the high bar necessary to challenge a statute.

But, at the same time, the court declined to say whether the use of allotments at private schools is constitutional. The court said that because school districts approve vendors to be paid with allotment funds, the state was the wrong party to sue. The court remanded the case to the lower court for further proceedings on that point.

A full decision will follow at a later date, the court said. The ruling comes just days before the lower court ruling was set to take effect and just a day afterEric Stone covers state government, tracking the Alaska Legislature, state policy and its impact on all Alaskans. Reach him atGov. Dunleavy trims $225M with budget vetoes but leaves school funding boost intact

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