The ongoing effort to seek government funding for Christian public schools failed in Oklahoma last year, but advocates are trying again with Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee and a Jewish public school in Oklahoma.
The Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 last May in a case over the constitutionality of the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, setting up 4-4 tie that preserved Oklahoma’s constitutional ban against funding religious public schools.
It was a rare loss for the powerhouse legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. But ADF didn’t take no for an answer. It went to Plan B: Working with Colorado conservatives to create a new Christian school that could give all nine members of the Supreme Court another opportunity to consider the issue.
A new Christian school called Riverstone Academy opened with about two dozen students in Pueblo, south of Colorado Springs, last August. Founders decided not to inform state education officials about the school’s Christian orientation. Officials learned in October that Riverstone is a Christian school.
The school hasn’t yet received any public funds but is requesting them, which would violate the state constitution, possibly setting up the new test case ADF seeks.
Riverstone was founded with the help of Forging Education, a Colorado nonprofit that operates a network of private Christian schools and provides programs for homeschooled students, reported the Washington Post.
“Our culture has become hostile to the Christian faith, and the public school system is the primary perpetuator of the secular, progressive worldview,” says Forging Education’s website. “Christians increasingly see the need to protect their children while still providing a quality academic education with a solid spiritual foundation.”
Ken Witt, an education consultant who helped launch Riverstone, previously worked with health and wealth preacher Andrew Wommack in his campaign to “take over” the city of Woodland Park and its school district. The district recently voted out the remaining Wommack-supported school board members.
In Oklahoma, the Plan B for advocates of state funding of religious schools is the proposed Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School, which would incorporate Jewish Scriptures, faith and values in its teaching.
A Florida group is raising funds for the Oklahoma school, hoping the state’s Charter School Board will approve it, as they approved St. Isidore. But the Freedom from Religion Foundation says it doesn’t matter whether a school is Jewish or Christian.
“The forces behind this effort don’t care whether the school is Catholic, Jewish, evangelical or otherwise religious,” said FFRF executive Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The goal is not pluralism — it’s clearly to crack open the door to taxpayer-funded religious education nationwide.”
FFRF reports one of the school board members who was behind Oklahoma’s Catholic Isidore of Seville is now working to get state funding for the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School.
In Tennessee, advocates behind Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville, which bills itself as “unapologetically Christian,” are suing to receive state funding.
FFRF says these efforts to provide taxpayer dollars to religious schools “are not isolated attacks, but part of a coordinated national plan to label a religious school a public charter school and get a case before the U.S. Supreme Court again to overturn decades of precedent against such outright subsidy.”
Giving one of these new Christian or Jewish schools public funds “would be catastrophic for public education,” said FFRF, and would give “an open invitation to turn public education into a religious ministry. This is about the survival of the wall between church and state in our public schools.”
Many states offer vouchers students can use to pay for tuition at private schools of their choice, including religious schools, but direct taxpayer funding of public religious schools isn’t permitted.
Justice Barrett did not give a reason for recusing herself in last year’s case over St. Isidore of Seville, but news outlets say it was likely because of her connections with Notre Dame’s Law School and its religious liberties legal clinic, which worked for years to get St. Isidore up and running.
She doesn’t appear to have any similar connections to the new Christian schools at issue in Colorado or Tennessee.
This article was originally published in Baptist News Global.
