Arguments Mustered For Supreme Court Case Of Religious Charter School
From Forbes.com
At the end of April, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin to hear arguments in a case that challenges the wall between church and state, and pro-school choice organizations, red states, and religious groups are lining up against Oklahoma’s attorney general and a group of Constitutional scholars.
St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond gives the court the opportunity to settle two questions: Are charter schools public or private entities, and may taxpayer dollars be used to fund an explicitly religious school?
Early in 2023, Oklahoma State Attorney General Gentner Drummond issued an opinion about the prospect of the state approving a church-run charter school. He was reversing the opinion of his predecessor, saying that previous opinion “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion."
In June 2023, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board ignored him and approved the St. Isidore of Seville virtual charter, a cyber school that was proposed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in collaboration with the Diocese of Tulsa.
Drummond, a conservative Republican who has since announced his candidacy for governor, called the decision “contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interests of taxpayers.” Furthermore, "It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars.” Oklahomans, he argued, would soon find themselves on a “slippery slope,” forced to fund charters that promoted religions to which they objected.
Drummond’s suit made it to the Oklahoma state supreme court, which determined that A) St. Isidore is a charter school and therefore a public school; and so B) public taxpayer dollars may not be used to fund it, per the Oklahoma state constitution. Wrote the court:
The State’s establishment of a religious charter school violates Oklahoma statutes Oklahoma Constitution, and the Establishment Clause. St. Isidore cannot justify existence by invoking Free Exercise rights as religious entity. St. Isidore came into existence through its charter with the State and will function as a component of the state’s public school system. The case turns on the State’s contracted-for religious teachings and activities through a new public charter school, not the State’s exclusion of a religious entity.
It would be interesting to see what the arguments would be if the context was the withdrawal of funding. The current administration seems to have clearly established a precedent that funds can be axed with a simple claim of “waste, fraud or abuse” no matter how specious that claim might be.