An Oklahoma school board is set to consider next week whether to approve the first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in the United States in a move that follows recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings expanding religious rights.
Supporters and critics of the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School have said the board's vote scheduled for next Tuesday could trigger a significant legal fight over the separation of church and state.
St. Isidore, a joint effort by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa, would offer virtual learning from kindergarten through high school, enrolling up to 500 students in 2024 and eventually expanding to 1,500 students, organizers said. They estimated that it would cost Oklahoma taxpayers up to $25.7 million over its first five years in operation as a charter school.
Public funding of religious charter schools has serious implications for taxpayers, nonreligious Americans, followers of other religions and LGBT people, according to Karen Heineman of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a secular group opposing the school's application. In the Maine ruling, the court backed two Christian families in their challenge to that state's tuition-assistance program that had excluded private religious schools. Maine had required eligible schools to be "nonsectarian," excluding those promoting a particular religion and presenting material "through the lens of that faith." The justices found that Maine was required to pay for students to attend religious schools if it did so for private secular schools.
St. Isidore chose not to set up as a private school because tuition costs would have been prohibitive for the rural families it seeks to serve, its organizers said. O'Connor's successor as attorney general, Republican Gentner Drummond, withdrew that opinion in February, saying it "misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion."
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