Debate rages over ‘Erin’s Law’

ANCHORAGE — A 75-year-old great-grandmother who was sexually assaulted as a girl decades ago says she recently confronted Sen. Mike Dunleavy, R-Wasilla, over changes he made to a bill designed to require sexual abuse education in schools.

In a letter to the editor to the Frontiersman and subsequent interview, Betty Brickel says she went to the Anchorage Legislative Information Office June 1 to talk to Sen. Dunleavy and Mat-Su Sen. Charlie Huggins about House Bill 44, also known as the Alaska Safe Children’s Act. Sen. Dunleavy chairs the Senate Education Committee, and Huggins is a member of the committee. The committee recently had a hearing for HB 44, which cruised through the House with broad bipartisan support on a 34-6 vote. But instead of passing the popular proposed legislation intact, the committee added several more unrelated — and controversial — elements to it.

However, when Brickel asked Sen. Dunleavy about it, she said Sen. Dunleavy replied he hadn’t made any changes to the HB 44. Brickel repeated her question, and Sen. Dunleavy repeated his answer, which made Brickel angry.

“’I don’t believe anything you say,’” Brickel recalled saying to Sen. Dunleavy.

In response, Sen. Dunleavy abruptly walked away, she said.

Sen. Dunleavy said he also recalls the encounter, but not specifically what was said.

The anecdote illustrates how high passions on either side of the fight to enact the law have run. Newspaper editorial pages and columnists have blasted Sen. Dunleavy for injecting pet partisan elements into a bill designed to reduce Alaska’s sky-high rates of sexual assault, sexual abuse, and dating violence. Some criticism has attempted to tie changes in the bill to Sen. Dunleavy’s potential campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Brickel and Sen. Dunleavy attend the same church, Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Wasilla, which is what led Brickel to approach him directly. Brickel was herself abused between the ages of 7 and 10 in the late 1940s and early 1950s, until a family relocation put her out of the reach of her abuser. Feelings of helplessness, and the ensuing years of painful isolation and heartbreak, still bring tears to her eyes, she wrote.

“I felt worthless, I felt dirty,” she said. “I didn’t have relatives I could talk to about it.”

Brickel survived. She also survived a near-fatal crash on the Knik River Bridge in 1979, and treatment for her injuries without anesthetic. More recently, she’s survived breast cancer, and runs marathons. She’s seen the impacts of sexual abuse on other members of her family, including her grandson.

For her, the issue is vital and pressing, and shaped as much by her concern for other potential victims as her dogged resilience.

“I want that bill for the children of Alaska,” she said.

Sen. Dunleavy’s claim was a lie, Brickel said.

“Mr. Dunleavy looked me in the eye and boldly lied to me,” she wrote, in an op-ed piece printed today.

Legislative autopsy

The bill is known colloquially as “Erin’s Law,” though the short official title is the Alaska Safe Children’s Act. For most of this year’s legislative session, it contained two essential components. The first requires Alaska school systems to implement training for sex abuse and sex assault awareness for students from kindergarten through grade 12. Legislators in the House Finance Committee combined it with another bill, known as Bree’s Law, which would require dating violence education for students in grades seven through 12.

Erin’s Law is named for Erin Merryn, who survived sexual assault as a youth to become a renowned author, while Bree’s Law is named for Breanna Moore, murdered last year in Anchorage, allegedly by her boyfriend Joshua Almeda, whose trial is scheduled to begin in August, according to court documents.

Combined, Bree’s Law and Erin’s Law comprised three pages in the version of HB 44 that was taken up by Sen. Dunleavy’s Education Committee. However, a 12-page bill emerged from committee.

In its present form, it establishes, among other things “A parent’s right to direct the education of the parent’s child,” and allows parents to withdraw their children from standards-based testing, or sex education, or from “inquiries into personal or private family affairs,” including anonymous surveys. The bill also prohibits employees of, or volunteers with, an “abortion services provider” from teaching sex education.

Dunleavy said that the original bill, with just the sex abuse component, unanimously passed a Senate vote during the second session of the 2013-14 Legislature, and that he had voted for it then. The bill ultimately did not pass the House that year, so it was reintroduced this year, he said.

Legislative records show the bill was effectively introduced twice, as is often the case with proposed legislation. Senate Bill 37 was the original version of HB 44 introduced in the Senate.

Some education officials, including superintendents from the Kake and Ketchikan school systems, expressed concern that adding an additional mandate at a time of strict budget cuts could unduly impose an additional burden on school systems. Among those who testified April 2 about potential challenges posed by the bill to school districts, was Alaska Superintendents Association Executive Director Lisa Skiles-Parady.

“Districts have very limited instructional time,” she said. “You think of it as a box that’s full. If you put something in it, the things inside have to get smaller, or you have to take something out.”

Districts also were concerned about money, because the bill would required school systems to fund the new curriculum, Skiles-Parady said.

As a result, the first amendments considered by the committee were designed to consolidate other mandated training requirements into a single idea, Sen. Dunleavy said.

“The vast majority of wording in the (new version of HB 44 that emerged from the Education Committee last week) has to do with mandates, to take off of the school districts so they could make room for Erin’s Law, both time and money,” he said.

The process of combining those changes with Bree’s Law began later in the regular legislative session, Sen. Dunleavy said, and the process of combining Bree’s Law with the other amendments was time-consuming.

Sen. Lesil McGuire, who introduced SB 37, was absent for part of the session because of a family illness. While HB 44 languished more or less untouched, apart from the merger between Erin’s Law and Bree’s Law, according to legislative records, SB 37 underwent serious revisions, most of which were not ready for publication on April 19, the last day of the regular legislative session.

Then, on April 20, Gov. Bill Walker called the Legislature into special session. Among the bills he named for consideration was HB 44. However, by then, the Senate version of the bill had already changed substantially, and HB 44 had passed out of the House in its simplest form, Sen. Dunleavy said.

Legislators on the Education Committee ultimately decided to combine SB 37 with language from another proposal — SB 89 — as well as language from the mandate discussion, concerns about the cost of the new imposition, and a bill authored by Rep. Lynn Gattis, R-Wasilla, that defunded assessments for teachers based on results of the SAT, ACT, and others into a single legislative move.

“Why don’t we put it all together, bring it out, get it voted on, get everything voted in there,” Sen. Dunleavy said. “That way, we take these things off of the education plate going into next year, because with declining revenues, we are anticipating a robust discussion regarding all kinds of educational issues next year.”

A matter of time

Sen. Dunleavy’s Education Committee formalized the changes May 21, to near-universal condemnation in the press and advocates for the original legislation. Much of the criticism centered on Sen. Dunleavy. An Alaska Journal of Commerce editorial labeled the changes a “political clown show.”

“The session isn’t over yet, so the race for biggest disgrace isn’t over, but suborning the will of overwhelming majorities to the fringe elements being courted by Sen. Dunleavy is easily the current clubhouse leader,” the editorial says, in part.

Besides the accumulation of parental rights, drawn word-for-word from another education bill, SB 89, which passed unanimously out of the committee, the Erin’s Law and Bree’s Law section of HB 44 were changed from requiring curricula on sex abuse and dating violence to merely allowing them.

Critics, like Breanna Moores’ sister, Brooke Moore, say that change effectively guts the law.

“That defeats the whole purpose of this bill,” she wrote, in an op-ed published June 5 in the Frontiersman.

Sen. Dunleavy says he was trying to help school systems. For example, the original bill does not specify a curriculum to use, so districts would have to choose among potential curricula.

“The ‘shall’ was changed to a ‘may’ to allow school districts time to adjust to the law, find the resources,” he said. “There have been some private outfits that would help with money, etc., and we weren’t sure what school district funding was going to be this year. And as we speak today, we’re not sure.”

He said he rejects the implication that the changes were made for partisan reasons. Legislators in various states have held up the bill for different reasons. For example, Democrats in the New York State Assembly repeatedly blocked the bill on the principle that the New York Board of Regents, which oversees education in New York, should implement it, not the Legislature.

“If you look at all the states, they have versions of Erin’s Law,” he said. “They all don’t look the same.”

The Education Committee’s version of the bill was not constructed as a poison pill, Sen. Dunleavy said. Nor were the changes aimed at a possible campaign against Murkowski, he said, adding that he hasn’t made a decision about running for U.S. Senate.

“I told folks I’d make a decision as soon as this discussion was over, and this session has gone on a looooong time,” he said.

Since the changes to HB 44 were unveiled, the bill has languished in the Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Dunleavy said he expects additional changes could be made before the bill moves to a house vote. Including the removal of the Education Committee amendments, he said.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.