Maine Court: Schools That Accept State Funding Must Abide By State Rules
From Forbes.com
In 2022, the Supreme Court determined that Maine could not deny religious schools access to taxpayer-funded vouchers. Now a U.S. District judge has ruled that where those government funds go, government rules may follow.
Carson v. Makin spun from a peculiarity of Maine education law. Because not all small towns in Maine can afford to run their own school system, the state allows for vouchers for students from one community without a school to attend in a community that has one. But the law restricted the use of those vouchers to schools that did not venture outside the traditional, secular model. Lower courts agreed that “Maine’s tuition program does not act as a penalty for religious exercise, it merely declines to subsidize it.”
In June of 2022, the Supreme Court disagreed, saying that if the state paid for a secular school option, it must also pay for the religious version. Like other cases in this sequence, the decision seemed to elevate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment over the establishment clause.
The win in Carson did not go quite far enough for some. Maine had modified its Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, shutting some private religious schools out of the voucher system to which Carson had won them admission.
In lawsuit filed last March, Crosspoint Church, which operates Bangor Christian School (BCS—one of the schools involved in Carson), called the restrictions a “poison pill” that keeps the school unable to accept state taxpayer money due to these restrictions on employment discrimination.
In a ruling filed at the end of February, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock, a 2003 George W. Bush appointee with senior status since 2017, denied a request for a preliminary injunction, indicating that he did not believe the BCS lawsuit would succeed.
The ruling means that religious schools who wish to accept taxpayer-funded vouchers must abide by the nondiscrimination provisions in the Maine Human Rights Act, including those that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.