It is an interesting question. Why would a tiny school district such as Galena City Schools enthusiastically take on the responsibility for educating students in urban districts like Fairbanks or Anchorage? Galena is a village of about 635 on the Yukon river about 280 miles west of Fairbanks. Tax revenue is minimal, 3% sales and no property taxes. They have an annual enrollment in its brick-and-mortar schools of around 125 students. It’s pretty expensive to teach a kid in remote Galena which is off the road and rail system. I ask again, why would they take on the task of educating kids in Anchorage or even Ketchikan which is more than a thousand miles away?
Families who are in Galena’s Interior Distance Education of Alaska (IDEA) program are adamant that the motives are entirely altruistic. That is, they enrolled over 3600 students in SY2006/2007 because they ‘care about homeschoolers.’ As John Stossel says, “Give me a break.”
Let’s go back to 1998 and SB36 which rewrote the Foundation Formula. The Foundation Formula is created and used by the Alaska Legislature to allocate state funds to local districts around the state. For many years the formula granted dollars on a basis deemed unfair by Fairbanks, Juneau or Anchorage residents like me. Folks like us live in organized municipalities or boroughs that tax their constituents for k12 education. Many rural communities are not organized, have no tax revenue for k12 education and were heavily weighted in the formula. In effect, urban residents were heavily and unfairly subsidizing rural communities. SB36 shifted much of the burden back to rural districts who lost significant revenue. Rural districts cried foul but, nevertheless, had to look for a way to pay for their schools.
At about the same time, Alaska’s charter school statute was passed and one of the first schools to seek authorization was Family Partnership Charter School (FPCS) in Anchorage. It is a charter school targeting home-based education that enrolls only Anchorage students. Galena City Schools took this concept and ran with it. They opened IDEA while FPCS was still going through the statutory process of obtaining charter approval from the Anchorage School District and the State Board of Education. For the first time in Alaska history a local school district was enrolling students statewide. Other rural districts soon followed the example to provide basic services to homeschool families and pocket the rest.
I raise this point because unless this primary motivation is acknowledged we cannot have an honest, open debate about public homeschool programs and how they are regulated and funded. That is, statewide correspondence schools operate for the purpose of subsidizing their local district’s revenue stream.
I had never thought about this topic. To be honest I never really gave it much thought as to why there are so many distance learning districts that are based in the villages. My husband and I made the decision before actually beginning to homeschool to not join any of these programs but to be independent.
I’ll admit that there have been times when I wished that we hadn’t made that commitment, I know that my son has questioned our wisdom, as I watch others take advantage of the “free” money that they offer. Now I’m kind of glad that we didn’t do this.
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