A high-stakes battle over a popular form of homeschooling reached the Alaska Supreme Court Thursday, as the justices grilled attorneys representing the state, public school families and a group of parents who use state funding to send their children to private schools.key to the correspondence school system as it exists today. The laws relaxed state regulations on how correspondence school learning plans are constructed and how cash payments to families, known as allotments, can be spent.
“And where a fundamental federal right exists, the state is not only barred from flatly prohibiting the exercise of that right, the state also may not condition the receipt of a benefit on foregoing the exercise of that right,” West said.“Because of the Free Exercise clause , the court has looked and said you can’t deny a benefit to an entity based solely on its religious status. That’s discrimination against … religion or religious practice.
Kendall was paraphrasing Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who proposed the homeschool reforms while in the Alaska Senate. Former West Virginia Solicitor General Elbert Lin represented the state. He told the justices the lower court’s ruling had gone too far. He argued that there was a wide range of permissible spending under the allotment law — including purchases at retailers like Target or Amazon — and that the court should allow the law to stand.
“They don’t have a role to play in the approval or disapproval reimbursements for the allotment spending,” Lin said. “They can’t direct the districts as part of that process to either approve or disapprove a particular reimbursement.”
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