Alaska
Alaska Supreme Court weighs whether correspondence education lawsuit wrongly targeted state • Alaska Beacon
Alaska Supreme Court justices on Thursday weighed whether a lawsuit seeking to have the large portions of the state’s correspondence school program found unconstitutional wrongly focused on the state government.
The justices heard arguments in the appeal of a Superior Court ruling that found a correspondence school program law to be unconstitutional.
A central question from the justices during oral arguments was whether plaintiffs should be suing the state’s education department or individual districts.
The case whose decision is under appeal is State of Alaska, Department of Education and Early Development v. Alexander, in which plaintiffs argued that it is unconstitutional for public education money to be spent on private school tuition. Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman found the spending unconstitutional and struck down the parts of statute that allow homeschool allotment money; he suggested lawmakers could rewrite the law to make it constitutional.
The state constitution does not allow the use of public funds for the benefit of private or religious schools.
Attorneys for the state of Alaska, a group of parents whose children attend private school using allotment money and another set of parents who argue that spending is unconstitutional all made oral arguments. Justices interrupted all three of the attorneys’ arguments with pointed questions about how the case should be decided.
Attorneys for the state appealed Zeman’s ruling and said the case should not hold the state’s education department to account because individual school districts are the only oversight body for homeschool spending.
In May, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Deputy Attorney General Cori Mills argued the lower court’s ruling should be thrown out because it is too broad, but Elbert Lin, a Virginia lawyer hired by the state, argued that since the Alaska statute that governs homeschool allotment spending has many constitutional applications, such as spending for school supplies as retailers like Target, it should not be thrown out — even if there is also the opportunity for the statute to be applied unconstitutionally.
“It is irrelevant whether the provision might be applied unconstitutionally in the view of the plaintiffs or even this court,” he said. Lin argued that if there is an unconstitutional use of the funds, the plaintiffs should sue individual districts, not the state. That way the courts can enforce any unconstitutional spending with a “scalpel rather than a sledgehammer.”
The state’s education department was once responsible for monitoring homeschool allotment spending, but a 2014 law proposed by Dunleavy, then a state senator, put that responsibility on districts instead.
Justice Dario Borghesan probed Lin’s argument and asked if state law allows allotments to be spent on full-time private school tuition. He said “both text and legislative history” suggest that full-time enrollment in private school is not correspondence study, which requires a certified teacher to come up with a learning plan for the student. “That seems somewhat nullified, or maybe a rubber stamp, if the child is just attending private school full time,” he said.
Anchorage parents who use homeschool allotments to pay for private school educations joined the case as intervenors, as people who could be affected by its outcome. Their attorney, Kirby Thomas West, took a different tack than the attorney for the state, and argued that the court should make a decision to reverse the lower court’s ruling. She argued that it would violate the United States Constitution to tell parents how they can spend their money.
Borghesan pushed back on that assessment because allotments are public school money. He cited previous case law: “While parents may have a fundamental right to decide whether to send their child to public school, they do not have a fundamental right, generally, to direct how a public school teaches their child,” he read. Essentially, he said, states have authority over how public education money is spent, so the state can stipulate that it may not be spent on a private education.
West sought to make her point through a different comparison: “It would be absurd and patently unconstitutional to suggest that the state must police the use of Permanent Fund dividends to ensure that no Alaskan ever uses that money to defray the cost of their child’s tuition at a private school,” she said. “It’s just as unconstitutional to do so here.”
She asked the justices to place a stay, which is a pause on the implementation of a ruling, on the lower court’s decision if they sent the case back to the lower court for reconsideration. The stay would mean her clients could continue to spend public education money on private school tuition.
After the arguments, Chief Deputy Attorney General Margaret Paton-Walsh said she thought the case went well for the defense. “It’s always hard to read the tea leaves, but I think some of the justices certainly seem to be pretty skeptical of that superior court decision,” she said.
She pointed out that it is not typical for the intervenors to make a distinct argument from the defense: “So I think that creates an extra wrinkle for the justices to try to noodle through as they think about the case,” she said.
The plaintiffs’ attorney, Scott Kendall, asked the court to uphold Zeman’s ruling. He argued that the judge was right to strike down homeschool allotments because the intent of the statute is to allow unconstitutional spending.
He pointed to legislative history in his appeal: when Dunleavy proposed the allotment law, he also sought a change to the state constitution to allow public funds to be spent at private schools. Dunleavy also proposed enacting school vouchers, which like the amendment, did not pass.
Kendall said that for that reason the plaintiffs should not have to sue individual school districts, because the statute is meant to allow unconstitutional spending: “When a statute grants a plainly unconstitutional power, as it does in this case — and in fact, the legislative history meticulously explains that that was the very sole reason why this legislation was passed — then it’s clearly unconstitutional on its face,” he said.
Borghesan pushed back on this argument. He repeatedly asked Kendall why the whole statute should be thrown out, rather than targeting unconstitutional uses by suing districts. “Why does that bad purpose, you know, defeat the whole rest of the statute? I mean, we have separation of powers. We’re respectful of the Legislature’s actions,” he said. “We kind of have a duty to uphold constitutional applications of statutes.”
Kendall conceded there may be a way to keep the statute without allowing public education dollars to pay for private school tuition: “There is a possibility this court, with ingenuity, could do a limiting construction — could sever parts of this — and that would be an outcome we would support,” he said.
He then referred to an early court case, in which the Supreme Court invalidated state scholarships for Sheldon Jackson College, a Sitka institution that later closed.
“Because the real core concern here, again, is the core concern when you go back to the Sheldon Jackson case, which is, are we using public funds to subsidize a private educational purpose?” Kendall said. “Here it is clear. It’s clear from the purpose of the statute, it’s clear from the interveners’ very presence here, it’s clear this is happening, and it’s clear this was the purpose of the statute.”
Deena Bishop, the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development, was in the courtroom. She said after the hearing that, in her view, districts are doing a good job of ensuring state money is spent constitutionally. She did not directly say whether the state education department is in a position to regulate spending. Foremost, she said, her interest is correspondence students: “My purpose and goals are to have a great education every day for young people, and there are nearly 23,000 — it’s 22,900 students — that we want to ensure that their education continues without disruption.”
Chief Justice Peter Maassen said the court would consider the appeal and issue “something” but did not give a time frame for a decision: “No timelines are guaranteed, but we understand the urgency of the matter,” he said. Without a new court ruling, Zeman’s ruling would go into effect on Monday.
Editor-in-Chief Andrew Kitchenman contributed reporting to this story.
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Alaska
Book review: A fictional exploration of an honorable man’s life, infused with Territorial Guard history
“Honor at Last”
By Aurora Hardy; Epicenter Press, 2026; 146 pages; $14.95 paperback; $7.99 Ebook.
How does one write about a family member she hardly knew? In Aurora Hardy’s case, the answer came as a “fictional biography.” Although her new book never says outright that her novel is anything other than “based on a true story,” a reader might infer that the main character — Sonny — is her own father. In interviews, she has said that is the case, and that she built her story from what she could research and learn from other family members about the man who left his wife and daughter when she was 4.
The portrayal, a sympathetic one, swings back and forth between the life of an ailing Yup’ik man sitting outside his sister’s fish camp in 1978 and his memories of everything that has come before.
The most detailed sections of the book come early, concerning Sonny’s birth, early years, and especially his time in the Alaska Territorial Guard, also known more commonly as the “Eskimo Scouts,” beginning when he was just 12. “Honor at Last” could be considered, at least in part, a history of the Guard. Hardy presents that history from the point of view of a young person living on the lower Yukon, frightened by news of the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians, and proud to be a protector of his homeland.
Early on, a plane arrives with Maj. Marvin “Muktuk” Marston and Territorial Gov. Ernest Gruening, who make patriotic appeals and enlist volunteers. Sonny, whose skill with a rifle is attested to, is allowed to join and then works with his father to drill, cache supplies, keep trails open, patrol the river and coastline, identify foreign planes, and radio authorities to give and receive reports. On two occasions — likely fiction, but representing the work of the Guard — Sonny and his father shoot down a Japanese bomb balloon and search for a missing plane.
[Book review: A scholarly new perspective on the roles of Alaska Natives in World War II]
Hardy emphasizes the many changes that came to Native villages during the war years, the intense patriotism of villagers, and the sacrifices they made by forgoing their normal routines, rituals and especially their subsistence practices. “The unity of purpose empowered the Yupik men. Old men dug deep into their remaining strength while young boys grew in purpose and care while serving in the Guard.”
By the end of the war years, Sonny had contracted tuberculosis. While he yearns to join his friends in signing up for additional military service, his health requires multiple hospitalizations in Bethel. There, removed from his village and its ways, he is exposed to white culture and meets and marries a blue-eyed nurse.
In Hardy’s telling, Nuliaq — Yup’ik for “wife,” the name used throughout — is loving but manipulative. She insists on moving to Kodiak, where she’d first worked as a nurse, and then, after the 1964 earthquake, to Fairbanks, where the couple experience overt racism, then to caretake a remote mining camp where they spend a very cold winter. Nuliaq learns of Native allotments and moves the family, now with a small daughter, Bun, to Chitina. There, they build a cozy home on land “abundant with life and natural resources.”
Sonny, always a hard worker and devoted family man, is twice cheated by men who hire him, once of an entire summer’s earnings. He had never learned to read and write and depended on trust. He is at last forced to go to Anchorage to find work, never to return to his embittered wife and confused daughter. He also never returns to his home village.
After he leaves, Nuliaq refuses to speak of Sonny or to allow any contact with him, and Bun grows up without knowing anything of her father except what she later learns from his relatives. She had felt loved by him and held onto one particular memory, a time when he “read” a familiar storybook to her; instead of reading the words she knew almost by heart, he made up his own story, one infused with Yup’ik knowledge and teachings.
Bun, seemingly a stand-in for Hardy herself, many years later comes across a news item about the U.S. Army discharging members of the Alaska Territorial Guard from service. Bun fills out the required paperwork and, in 2007, nearly 30 years after her father’s death, receives the document granting him an honorable discharge. Hardy concludes, imagining Bun’s reaction: “He had served as a Guard member when his country asked him to help fight the war. He had used his Guard training to overcome challenges for the rest of his life.”
Fiction serves history well when it brings to life people who lived it. Through her personal connection and research, Hardy has shown what the World War II experience in Western Alaska could have meant for a young man, and how his service may have influenced the rest of his life.
Between 1942 and 1947, 6,389 volunteers from 107 Alaska communities served in the Guard as a military reserve force of the U.S. Army. They were as young as 12 and as old as 80, mostly too young or old to be eligible for conscription. It wasn’t until 2000 that Sen. Ted Stevens introduced a bill to direct the Secretary of Defense to award Guard members honorary discharges; this was signed into law by President Clinton. Only then did Guard members receive veteran status and eligibility for federal benefits. The youngest of those who served, if still alive, were then in their 70s.
[Book review: ‘The North Face of Summer’ offers a compassionate look at an Alaska conflict]
[Book review: Steeped in Inuit culture, ‘Leave Our Bones Where They Lay’ offers a universal message]
From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with Alannah Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay.
In 2001, a Canadian mining company proposed a massive gold and copper mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, a pristine water system on the coast of the Alaska Peninsula that’s home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. The salmon support a thriving ecosystem and are a cultural and economic lifeblood for native Alaskans, who have stewarded the land and water for thousands of years.
As the company moved ahead with plans to build the largest open-pit mine in North America, those Indigenous communities joined together to bring it to a halt. In 2023, they secured a rare “EPA veto” of the proposed Pebble Mine, and the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America recognizes an Indigenous leader in this fight.
Alannah Hurley is the executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. Her Yup’ik name is Acaq, her great-grandmother’s name. She is the winner of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
STEVE CURWOOD: Before we start talking about your work protecting Bristol Bay, paint us a picture of the bay. What makes this such a special place?
ALANNAH HURLEY: Bristol Bay is an extremely special place. It has all the different types of terrain in Alaska, in one place. Where I live, at the mouth of the Nushagak and Wood River, we have everything from tundra and wetlands to mountains, freshwater lakes, freshwater rivers, the muddy waters of Nushagak Bay, [and] the beautiful, crystal-clear ocean waters as you go west towards Togiak and Twin Hills. It’s really untouched, pristine beauty—all of Alaska’s majesty in one place. It’s so pristine you can still hunt and fish and pick berries and eat them straight from the land. You can drink right out of the lake and rivers. It’s paradise.
CURWOOD: Bristol Bay has huge environmental significance, but it’s also important to many human communities. I had been told that it produces more than $2 billion of annual revenue from sockeye salmon fishing alone, it’s also an important food source and cultural site for Indigenous communities, First Alaskans. Talk to me about what the bay means to the people in the area.
HURLEY: There are three different Indigenous groups in Bristol Bay—the Yup’ik people, the Dena’ina people, and the Alutiiq people. Our homeland has been stewarded by our people for thousands and thousands of years. They’ve taken care of this place and entrusted it to us. Our lands, our water, and everything that that entails—the salmon, the moose, the caribou, the bears, us, our freshwater fish, our berries, our plants, our medicines—we very much view it as all very connected. Anything that happens to our lands and waters happens to us. It is everything to us. It is the health of our people, physically, culturally, spiritually. It sustains us. It nourishes us. We’re so blessed to be able to live in the ways that our ancestors have lived. That kind of foundation is really critical in understanding our perspective and wanting to protect our home.
CURWOOD: In 2001, the Northern Dynasty Minerals mining company proposed the development of what’s called the Pebble Mine. It would have been the largest open-pit mine on the continent, one of the biggest, I guess, in the whole world. What would have been the environmental impact of such a project?
HURLEY: The environmental impact of the Pebble project would have been devastation. If you look at a map of Bristol Bay, there are two major river systems, the Nushagak and the Kvichak. The Pebble Mine would be located at the connected headwaters of both. You literally could not have picked a poorer location, and in my opinion, it’s [the] creator’s test to the people: What are you going to choose? But you could not have picked a worse location to put a low-grade acid-generating project that would have to store tens of billions of tons of toxic waste in perpetuity.
That picture is not a question of if something will happen, but when, especially in an earthquake-prone zone, and in a very hydrologically interconnected place. They’re like the veins of the bay—all of that water is connected. Our people, very early on, came out opposed to the project, because we knew that it would mean the utter devastation of our watershed, our fishery and our people.
CURWOOD: Some say that there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of copper and gold and other minerals in the area for the Pebble Mine. Sounds like a lot of money, but you didn’t see this as good news for your community if this got developed.
HURLEY: No, we did not. Early on, before we learned about what type of ore it was, where it was located, what it would mean, what the tilings would mean, people were actually excited for some type of diversification of the economy. Fisheries can be pretty volatile, and that’s how a lot of people would survive in the cash economy as commercial fishermen.
But it did not take long to learn about those things, the dangers and the threat and the risk that that would cause to our people, and very early on, the vast majority of Bristol Bay’s people said, “No way, this is not worth the risk.” You cannot put a price tag on our water and what salmon mean to us as a people. This would be an existential threat to our ability to continue to be Indigenous people in this region, and we will not stop fighting until it is stopped.
CURWOOD: My understanding of Alaskan politics is that at the state level, there wasn’t a huge amount of pushback against this Pebble Mine proposal.
HURLEY: Our people’s concerns were really falling on deaf ears at the state level. We saw the state rewrite our area management plan illegally, without proper input or public process or consultation with our tribes. We saw the governor at the time try to pave the way for a mining district, and we’re still working to rectify some of those issues in that rewritten management plan to this day. And we’re still having issues with the state government pushing a project on Bristol Bay and Alaskans that they’ve proven for the last 20 years that they just do not support.
Because our concerns were falling on deaf ears at the state level, our tribal governments saw the federal government as the place to put some energy, and that was where the petition to the EPA came from, because the state was not listening. They were doing the exact opposite, to really grease the skids for the company to move forward.
CURWOOD: How did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency respond?
HURLEY: The tribes petitioned in 2010 to prohibit all mines like Pebble within the Bristol Bay watershed. The EPA came back and said, “We’re not going to act on a prohibition immediately under our authority under the Clean Water Act, but we are going to study Bristol Bay. We want to do an assessment. And we want to ask, is this place really unique, and what does this fishery mean to the state and people? If this type of development, large-scale hard rock mining, were to move forward, what kind of impact could that have on the waters and people?”
They took three years to do a bunch of studies. They were in a lot of different communities. There was a lot of peer review to answer those questions, and after that very long, drawn-out assessment, they determined what our people had been saying all along: that this type of development would devastate the water and everyone who was sustained by that water, and so that was really the basis for their action that came later.
CURWOOD: At the end of the day, how did things turn out with the EPA?
HURLEY: It was a bit of a roller coaster between the different administrations, but it’s really a testament to the dedication of our people and our region that regardless of the administration, regardless of winning and losing court cases, they did not give up. And so the EPA, in January 2023, finalized protections to stop the project.
CURWOOD: What’s the risk that the Trump administration number two could reverse all of that?
HURLEY: There is very much still a risk that that could happen. The company,Northern Dynasty, the state of Alaska and a few others have challenged the EPA protections in court, which we anticipated they would.
So far, the Trump administration has continued to defend [the] EPA’s action in court, but that is ongoing litigation, and we’re not putting all of our eggs in that basket with how unpredictable this administration has been in other arenas. We’re definitely remaining extremely vigilant. And we’re continuing to defend the protections in court, and we also are working on legislation that would address the other 20 active mining claims throughout the watershed.
While we’ve made great progress, unfortunately, Pebble isn’t the only mining claim in the region, and so we’re working really hard to put this type of development to bed for good, so that our kids aren’t destined to fight project by project, now into eternity.
CURWOOD: As executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, how important would you say tribal cooperation has been during this fight?
HURLEY: Tribal unity and cooperation has been absolutely critical. I think in any instance where a coalition is working to protect a place, having Indigenous people leading and center of the effort is absolutely critical. Local people need to be at the forefront of these fights, and without that unity in the bay, there’s no way we would be where we’re at today.
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CURWOOD: You were involved in building that coalition, including Native Alaskans, but also other political constituencies, the commercial fisherpeople and such. What was it like to build a coalition like that?
HURLEY: In the case of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, it was really about centering and amplifying the tribal voice and holding the government accountable for government-to-government consultation. There was real unity in that.
I think anytime you’re building a coalition, it can be challenging. I mean, it’s hard to get five people to agree to where you’re going to go to dinner, let alone 15 tribal governments from different cultural backgrounds who historically didn’t always get along, coming together to fight a common enemy for our continued existence as Indigenous people. That threat really brought us all together in ways that we had never seen before, and that also translated out to non-native groups, commercial fishermen, the conservation community. These aren’t people who usually get along. We’re used to fighting over fish, not working together to protect them, and so anytime you bring different groups together, there’s going to be bumps in the road.
At the end of the day, the connections between people, the relationships and the commitment to work [got us] through hard moments—and there were a lot of hard moments. A commitment, especially by non-native folks, to be in a respectful relationship with native people and us having that requirement that if we are going to be partners, this is how we expect to engage, helped lay the groundwork for a successful coalition. That’s never easy, it’s never pretty, but it was really the people-to-people relationships, those connections, that held us together even in the hard times.
CURWOOD: You’ve spoken about your grandmother’s influence and the values that propelled you through this journey. What lessons have you learned that have motivated you to keep going?
HURLEY: My grandmother was Mancuaq; I was raised with her in Clark’s Point in Bristol Bay. And it’s hard for me not to get emotional talking about her, because even now, even in all the different experiences in my life, everything important, the most important things that have helped me navigate life in a way that has been good and, you know, really grounded in love and respect and kindness came from her. Also the ability to persevere when things are tough. She passed away in 2019.
I obviously still miss her a lot. She provided me with the foundation of values, of how to move forward and live in this world in a good way. Our people have had those teachings for centuries—timeless, timeless teachings of what it means to be a good, real human being on the planet. And that foundation has helped me in life in invaluable and countless ways, and it continues to do so every day.
CURWOOD: What do you see for the future of Bristol Bay?
HURLEY: The future of Bristol Bay is beautiful. We are still struggling with the impacts of colonization, but we have only begun our healing, our reclamation, our revitalization of who we are as Indigenous people.
We have been so lucky that even through all of those challenges, our people have been able to remember and retain and still pass on our values and way of life. I feel like the potential to be a model of sustainability for the world led by Indigenous communities in modern society is boundless, and I’m really excited and hopeful that our region can shift from having to put our energy in defense of our homelands, to now help build something beautiful and tackle some of the tough issues that we’re facing.
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We are reviving Curious Alaska, a popular feature launched by the Anchorage Daily News in 2021.
The idea is simple: You have questions. Our reporters find answers. We share them with readers.
Maybe you’re curious about a landmark (like the Parks Highway Igloo, pictured below), or a tradition, a news event or a public figure from the past. Maybe you have a practical question about everyday life in Alaska.
On our initial run, we tackled more than 30 topics that readers inquired about.
Some examples of reader questions we’ve looked into so far include why we don’t have a Trader Joe’s here, whether there are snakes in Alaska, why sand dunes exist in Kincaid Park and the story behind cattle herds on remote islands in the state.
No topic is too offbeat for you to pitch. We’ll choose a question at a time and try our best to answer it. Send in yours using the form below. (Having trouble seeing the form? Try here.)
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