TULSA, Okla — St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School and the Oklahoma Charter School Board filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to establish the first religious charter school.
The appeal petitions the review of the cases against Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond.
Brett Farley, the executive director of Catholic Conference of Oklahoma claims this is not unconstitutional because the separation of church and state is not in the constitution.
“The notion of separation of church and state is not in the Constitution anywhere. That’s a phrase written in a letter from President Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist association which was entirely taken out of context it actually meant the exact opposite of how it’s used these days,” Farley said.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in Gentner’s favor in June saying the use of public dollars for a religious school is unconstitutional, but Farley is hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court will rule differently.
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“As we know, the court has already issued opinions three times in the past few years and favored school choice to operate as a religious entity in public programs. So all we are doing is simply asking the court to review our case and continue that precedent they’ve already set with those three court cases,” Farley said.
In the petition the SCOTUS must look at two questions:
- “Whether the academic and pedagogical choices of a privately owned and run school constitute state action simply because it contracts with the state to offer a free educational option for interested students.”
- “Whether a state violates the Free Exercise Clause by excluding privately run religious schools from the state’s charter school program solely because the schools are religious, or whether a state can justify such an exclusion by invoking anti-establishment interests that go further than the Establishment Clause requires.”
Farley said taxpayer dollars are already going to private schools through scholarships like the Lindsey Nicole Henry Program. With programs like this, Farley said the religious charter school wants the same fair share.
“That’s all we’re saying is we want to participate like everyone else is,” Farley said.
2 News reached out to Oklahoma Attorney General Drummond for an interview, he declined but sent a statement:
“I will continue to vigorously defend the religious liberty of all four million Oklahomans. This unconstitutional scheme to create the nation’s first state-sponsored religious charter school will open the floodgates and force taxpayers to fund all manner of religious indoctrination, including radical Islam or even the Church of Satan. My fellow Oklahomans can rest assured that I will always fight to protect their God-given rights and uphold the law.”
A few hundred kids enrolled in the virtual charter school before the state hit the pause button.
“That’s the most unfortunate situation in this whole ordeal is that we’ve got over 200 hundred families that applied which most were accepted into the school now have to go find some other means of educating their kids,” Farley said.
Now the petition is filed, the SCOTUS can decide if they want to take the case, Farley said they are expecting that to start sometime in the next year.
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