Supreme Court to decide whether Maine was allowed to ban public funds from religious schools 40 years ago

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The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court review of a Maine law banning the use of public tuition funds in religious schools will test a 40-year-old policy that stems from an effort to simply formalize educational practices in state law and not modify them.

The history of this policy is also tied to a 1980 decision by the John Bapst Catholic High School in Bangor to close and then reopen in the fall as a non-sectarian school.

The Supreme Court said on Friday it would hear a case that families in Glenburn and Palermo brought against the state in 2018 to challenge the law banning the use of public tuition funds in religious schools.

Both families come from cities without a designated public high school, so they are entitled to a public tuition fee that would allow them to attend a public or private school of their choice in another community as long as it is not a religious school. As part of their lawsuit, the families asked for funds for their children’s school fees to attend Christian schools in Bangor and Temple Academy in Waterville. Federal district and appellate court judges found Maine’s law constitutional.

The law the families are challenging was passed as part of a much larger recoding of Maine’s education laws in 1982. Legislative debate at the time shows lawmakers had no intention of changing policies as part of the process. Rather, they sought to codify them into state law.

However, the addition of the Religious Schools Act represented a change in policy. A Republican Senator from Bangor, Howard Trotsky, had sought clarification on the issue of religious funding while working to codify the state’s education laws, according to a 2006 editorial in The New York Sun. In response, Attorney General Richard Cohen, a Republican, said in a January 1980 notice that public funding for religious schools violated the First Amendment.

This change in policy led schools such as John Bapst Catholic High School in Bangor to close in June 1980 and reopen as a non-sectarian school in the fall. Today is John Bapst Memorial High School.

Michael Bindas, senior lawyer for families challenging the Maine law, called Cohen’s opinion “flawed” for reasons that became clear over the following years and in light of other Federal Court opinions.

“It is now evident that the attorney general’s original opinion was wrong,” said Bindas, who is affiliated with the Institute for Justice group which has championed the inclusion of religious schools in other school choice programs. “Nonetheless, the law enacted by the legislature in response to this notice is still in force.”

A spokesman for Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey pointed to Frey’s previous statements on the case in response to a request for comment on Wednesday. Last week, Frey said he was confident the Supreme Court would recognize “that nothing in the Constitution obliges Maine to include religious schools in its public education system.”

The state excludes religious schools from its school curriculum “because the education they provide is not equivalent to public education,” Frey said. “Religious schools can and do advance their own religion to the exclusion of all others, discriminate against both the teachers they employ and the students they admit, and teach religious views contrary to what is taught in public schools. “

The Maine Christian Schools Association opposed the 1982 legislation because its members fought all efforts to come under state control, Trotsky said during the debate in the Maine Senate on March 31, 1982.

The Maine Teachers Association and the Maine School Management Association were also involved in the development of the higher education bill, according to legislative discussions at the time. It was passed by Senate 21-10 on April 1, 1982 and House 112-28 four days later. It was promulgated by Governor of Maine Joseph E. Brennan.

In banning sectarian schools, the law makes explicit reference to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits state support for a specific religion in the establishment clause.

Efforts to ban government funding for religious schools began in the late 19th century. Maine congressman James G. Blaine called for a constitutional amendment banning such funding.

Although the Blaine Amendment never became a constitutional amendment, many states passed amendments to their constitutions prohibiting such funding, although opposition to these schools at the time was largely rooted in anti-Catholicism. rather than in a desire for secular education.

Maine has never added such an amendment to its constitution and remains one of 13 states without one today.

This is not the first legal challenge to Maine law.

The United States Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the law in November 2006, in Julia Anderson v. City of Durham. The Cumberland County Superior Court and the Maine Supreme Court ruled that Maine’s decision not to fund religious schools was constitutional under the First Amendment.

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