Fairbanks School District Takes DEED Out to the Woodshed in Court Filing Over Pearl Creek
The courts are about to decide if locally elected school boards still have authority. Fairbanks just filed an appeal to stop the Dunleavy administration from steamrolling local governance.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough School District promised to sue the state over the Pearl Creek STEAM Charter School debacle, and oh man, have they delivered. If you need to catch up with specifics, I recommend reading my May 13th piece.
Matthew Beck
Now that you're caught up, the school district has indeed filed its Statement of Points on Appeal in Superior Court. The document contains 44 specific arguments outlining how Governor Mike Dunleavy's Department of Education and Early Development and his handpicked State Board of Education overstepped their legal authority. Aside from being very spicy, the appeal systematically dismantles the state's attempted hostile takeover of local education decisions and exposes an illegal process for approving the charter application despite its numerous flaws.
A huge chunk of the district's appeal focuses on glaring due process violations and administrative overreach. The district points out that the DEED Commissioner's designee effectively abandoned her legal mandate and, instead of reviewing the local school board's factual findings to determine whether they were supported by, you know, actual evidence...invented her own alternative facts.
The school board had originally denied the Pearl Creek application for severe structural deficiencies, and the appeal hammers every single one of them. The State Board of Education chose to ignore the lack of a viable facility plan, a missing transportation plan, deficient educational programs, and a nonexistent student nutrition plan. The state also gave a free pass to the charter school's illegal tiered admission lottery. That lottery system would have given enrollment preference to founders' grandchildren and former students, a direct violation of state statutes requiring random drawings.
Rather incredibly, the State Board of Education ruled that this discriminatory scheme was completely compliant.
The district's point-by-point deliciously shreds the state's wild take on local governance. In overturning the school board's determination rejecting the charter school's application, DEED had essentially ruled that submitting an application which had been explicitly rejected was legally sufficient to force an agreement simply because all the boxes were ticked. It's wild - and there's more!
The school district even calls out the State Board of Education for violating the Alaska Open Meetings Act - claiming they issued its written decision approving the Pearl Creek charter school without holding a public meeting or conducting a public vote. Whoopsie!
Oh, and here's one more thing: The Pearl Creek STEAM Charter APC is also named as a defendant in the appeal. It sure looks like the group that happily rode an anti-public education administration's coattails to bypass their local school board may very well have to defend their deeply flawed application in front of a judge. 🥴
Anyway, the courts will now have to decide whether locally elected school boards still have authority in Alaska, or if the Dunleavy administration can simply ignore the law and do whatever the hell it wants.
