Florida's $15 million gift to Catholic schools comes with a bigger agenda

A new budget earmark will send taxpayer money to 68 Catholic schools, freeing up Church resources

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Tucked away in Florida’s recently approved $114.5 billion budget is $15 million for security funding in Catholic schools. Specifically, 68 schools in the Archdiocese of Miami, covering Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.

Cross in a classroom (image via Adobe Spark)

While “security funding” may be secular on the surface—allowing it to evade constitutional concerns—the move allows the Archdiocese to shift around its own resources. By receiving taxpayer dollars for building upgrades, they now have a new pool of their own money to spend on religious indoctrination—more teachers, more textbooks, more administrators.

Ultimately, Republicans in Florida are promoting the spread of Christianity.

All of this is on top of a massive voucher program in Florida that has already diverted money that should be going to public schools to private (and often religious) schools. In the same budget, the “Family Empowerment Scholarship” program, which allows parents to send their kids to their preferred schools, is projected to receive $4.5 billion. (The program has been criticized its lack of oversight and wasted dollars.)

In this case, the security cash involves a lot of upgrades that private schools ought to be able to pay for on their own:

The plan is to invest in building and equipment upgrades like fences, bulletproof glass and video recording systems as well as fund more safety officers and their training, according to budget documents. Covering the costs of hiring additional law enforcement will likely be high on the priority list for the new funding, said [superintendent of Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Miami Jim] Rigg.

While this is only meant to be a one-year infusion of cash, the Catholic Schools superintendent hinted that it would be the start of a long-term relationship: “We’re hoping this is the beginning of much more to come.”

The Miami Herald noted that this money was the result of direct lobbying by the Catholic Church and was meant to deal with rising violence in schools.

Catholic leaders began advocating for the security grants after last year’s mass shooting at a Catholic Church in Minneapolis, which killed two children and injured 28 others.

That’s a very real concern, but you know where else there were mass shootings? In public schools. Something Rigg himself noted with no sense of self-awareness:

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of the tragic 2018 shooting at a public school, is within the boundaries of the Archdiocese and still weighs on the psyche of people in South Florida,” Rigg added.

He correctly notes that public schools already receive funding for security—the new budget includes $290 million through “Florida’s Safe Schools Allocation” for public school security upgrades—but private schools shouldn’t be receiving any taxpayer funds for things tuition dollars should be covering. If they can’t make the math work on their own, they have no business running their own side schools.

Even in the budget request for this $15,000,000, advocates gave the game away. They say the improved security will “increase or improve economic activity” in the state because better security will lead to more families moving to Florida “because of the safety and quality of Catholic schools” which will lead to higher “enrollment in Catholic schools and preschools.”

Why should Florida lawmakers care if there’s higher enrollment in Catholic schools? That’s not their job.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation denounced this giveaway, but they didn’t say they planned to file a lawsuit. That may be because this is an uphill battle and trying to convince the courts that this is blatant religious favoritism seems like a lost cause right now, especially because the money is going to security and not, say, a stack of Bibles. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t sound the alarm:

“This is a blatant example of taxpayers being forced to subsidize religious institutions” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The government has no business singling out one denomination for special treatment and handing it millions of dollars in public funds, particularly with our public schools, which serve all evenhandedly, being grossly underfunded.”

…

“Every child deserves to be safe at school,” Gaylor says. “But if the state wishes to provide security assistance, it must do so through neutral programs that treat all schools equally, not by carving out special appropriations for politically connected religious organizations.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis has the power to just cross this item off the budget list, but he’s not about to do that. Which means religious authorities in Florida figured out a new way to funnel tax dollars into their coffers. They won’t stop until they’ve sucked out as much public money as they possibly can.

Here’s what will happen in the long term: Public schools, which are already underfunded, will continue to struggle. And when that happens, lawmakers will inevitably cite those struggles—the struggles they fueled— as reasons to expand the voucher program and hand over even more money (for security, capital investments, etc.) to these private religious schools.

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