The Alaska Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court's decision that found two laws governing Alaska's publicly funded homeschooling programs violated the state constitution by providing public money to private schools.

The ruling is a victory for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who has tried to defend the laws and keep them in place. But it is largely procedural in nature, and the lawyer who originally challenged the constitutionality of the laws vowed to continue fighting against the practice of spending distance education allotments on private school tuition.

More than 22,000 students in Alaska take distance learning courses that allow families to receive reimbursement of up to $4,500 per student per year for homeschooling materials and curriculum. But under legislation Dunleavy first proposed more than a decade ago as a state senator, the allotments have increasingly been used to cover the cost of private school tuition.

In April, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman ruled that the practice violated Alaska's constitution, which prohibits the spending of public funds “for the direct benefit of religious or other private educational institutions.”

A day after oral arguments in the case, the Alaska Supreme Court overturned Zeman's ruling, siding with the state's lawyers who argued that the case was wrongly brought against the Alaska Department of Education rather than individual school districts that had allowed distance learning funds to flow to private schools.

The justices declined to rule on whether the use of allotment funds in private schools is constitutional. They found that the lawsuit should have included a specific school district as a defendant because school districts, not the state, design distance-learning students' curricula and approve the use of allotment funds.

In a written statement Friday evening, Dunleavy said distance learning programs “can continue in full” under the ruling.

The original case was brought against the state last year by a group of parents represented by Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall. Kendall said Friday he wants to talk to his clients about pursuing a lawsuit that includes a district, with the goal of getting a definitive answer on whether allotments could be used to cover the cost of tuition at private schools.

Kendall called the Alaska Supreme Court's decision “primarily a procedural one” and said the justices' questioning during oral arguments Thursday “strongly suggests” that they would find the practice of spending budget funds on private school tuition unconstitutional.

Kendall said that “there is more than one school district that has essentially publicly advertised the use of petty cash for school funds as a service that they provide. So there will be several potential targets to choose from.”

The Denali Borough School District, for example, once stated on its website that the majority of the approximately 700 students enrolled in its distance learning program, called PEAK, “were simultaneously enrolled in one of Anchorage’s many private schools.”

Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor called the court decision “a victory for the rule of law.”

“To strike down the entire statutory scheme based on an allegation of some kind of unconstitutional spending is not consistent with the rules of statutory and constitutional interpretation. Laws are presumed to be constitutional and there must be a high bar to striking them down,” Taylor said in a prepared statement.

Taylor's wife, Jodi Taylor, was open about using the allotments to cover private school fees, saying she had done so for her own children.

The state has reached agreements with outside counsel to assist it in this case and in future appeals. Those lawyers include former West Virginia Solicitor General Elbert Lin and the Texas-based First Liberty Institute, which takes on religious freedom cases.

The Alaska Supreme Court's order means that if the original plaintiffs in the case decide to pursue a lawsuit against a specific school district, it will first be considered by the Superior Court. Kendall said this would lengthen the time before Alaska families have a clear answer about the permissible use of correspondence allotments, but that the courts would likely ultimately decide the issue.

“I would be surprised if we didn’t have a definitive answer before this point next year,” Kendall said.

In the meantime, school districts could continue to approve funding allocations for private schools as before, but Kendall said the court has not approved such a measure.

“There is nothing in this decision that remotely condones the practice of using grant funds for private schools,” Kendall said.

This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.