Oklahoma (finally) rescinds contract with taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school
This was a "serious threat to the religious liberty of all four million Oklahomans," said the state's attorney general
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It’s finally over. (For now.) The contract between Oklahoma’s Statewide Charter School Board and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School has been ripped up. The nation’s first religious charter school will not be launching this month—at least not with the benefit of any taxpayer dollars.
It’s a devastating development for conservatives who want public money to fund private (Christian) education. But the end of the contract was expected since June, when the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled 7-1 to block the state from opening St. Isidore.
On Monday, the Statewide Charter School Board voted unanimously to obey the law by pulling the contract and avoid contempt charges from the state’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond. He was threatening to go after non-compliant board members with citations that could have landed them a six-month jail sentence and a $500 fine.
But the vote came with a caveat: If a higher court, like the Supreme Court, overturns the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision, the Catholic school will be back in business. (The Board voted two weeks ago to appeal the decision to SCOTUS, but they have not yet filed that appeal.)
Drummond, who has been a rather surprising champion of church/state separation during this whole saga, celebrated the contract’s nullification even as he noted it shouldn’t have taken this long:
“While it is appalling that the board took so long to recognize the authority of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, I am pleased that board members finally fulfilled their duty,” Drummond said in a statement after the meeting. “The proposed state-sponsored religious charter school, funded by our tax dollars, represents a serious threat to the religious liberty of all four million Oklahomans.”
On the other hand, State Superintendent Ryan Walters, the Christian Nationalist who fantasizes about theocracy, put out a predictably insane response:
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has failed Oklahomans in their latest dismal ruling against parents and kids. They have chosen the path of liberal extremism and Marxism by depriving parents of a choice. It’s shameful, but predictable from a failed judicial system. They do not represent conservative Oklahoma values.
Walters wasn’t at the Statewide Charter School Board meeting, but his proxy voted with everyone else to rescind the contract. Still, you know you’re losing the argument when you have to call a Republican-majority Supreme Court not representative of “conservative Oklahoma values.” Especially when that court’s majority laid out a very blunt explanation for their decision:
We hold that the St. Isidore Contract violates the Oklahoma Constitution, the [Oklahoma Charter Schools] Act, and the federal Establishment Clause. St. Isidore is a public charter school. The Act does not allow a charter school to be sectarian in its programs… Under both state and federal law, the State is not authorized to establish or fund St. Isidore.
…
Enforcing the St. Isidore Contract would create a slippery slope and what the framers’ warned against—the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention.
They said tax dollars couldn’t fund sectarian education. It wasn’t that complicated.
Had they ruled the other way, it would have been a disaster, opening the floodgates well beyond Oklahoma’s borders. And if taxpayers have to pay for private religious schools, that means even less money available for public education.
To make sense of what’s happening here, it helps to know how this religious school got a green light in the first place. I wrote a much lengthier explanation of that here. What’s relevant right now is that the Oklahoma's Statewide Virtual Charter School Board (as it used to be called) was warned this school would be a problem for all the reasons the justices cited… but they approved it anyway.
Besides the unconstitutionality of its existence, this school was a problem because of the way it would have operated. Unlike public schools, this Catholic school would not require teachers to be certified, would not have to accept openly LGBTQ teachers, and would explicitly promote Catholic doctrine during school hours. There was also the possibility that students who became pregnant could get expelled—along with trans students just for existing—and that sex education would be omitted from the curriculum. In addition, this kind of school wouldn’t have the resources to take on special needs students. (“That is something we will need to develop,” said Lara Schuler, senior director of Catholic education at the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, during a presentation in February of 2023.)
All the while, taxpayers would be footing the bill.
How did conservatives defend any of that? The proposed K-12 school would theoretically help Catholics in rural parts of Oklahoma obtain a faith-based education. The Supreme Court has already said that if taxpayer dollars are available for general programs, an institution can’t be excluded from consideration just because it’s religious. The Catholic Church used that argument to justify the creation of this charter school.
Without court intervention, the school would have been scheduled to open this fall. Over the first five years, it was expected to cost taxpayers more than $26 million.
By approving the school, the Charter School Board fully ignored the will of Oklahoma’s voters who rejected a 2016 ballot measure that would have repealed the part of the State Constitution, the “no aid” clause, that bans public money from being used for religious purposes. (They rejected that measure on the same night Donald Trump was elected.)
Drummond’s opposition to the school was partly surprising because his predecessor fully supported the idea. For a high-ranking Republican in a red state, Drummond’s decision to fight on the side of church/state separation was both surprising and arguably courageous.
The existence of one faith-based, taxpayer-funded charter school threatened public education funding all across the country. We should be grateful that, at least for now, the problem was stopped before it spread elsewhere.
(Large portions of this article were published earlier)
To the surprise of no one, the people on the losing side here see themselves as the victims of the godless left because tax payers are not being required to support a religious school. The courts are there to interpret the law, not protect his beloved conservative Oklahoma values. Those words do not appear in any constitution or statute. The religious right never stops trying to force their religion into the public schools, paid for by everyone's tax dollars. It is tacit acknowledgment of just how weak their arguments are that they feel the need to get to children before they've reached the age of reason. Time and again they demonstrate why religion should not have any role to play in government.
People of faith who have studied history at all know that the Establishment clause is a protection, not a punishment, and needs to be preserved for their own freedom and safety.