Can Maine Cover the Cost of Christian School Tuition?

By amazon Saturday, December 4, 2021 Comment Edit

The latest Supreme Court case over public funding for sectarian education challenges distinctions between religious identity and religious purpose.

The latest Supreme Court case over public funding for religious schooling examines a policy in Maine, a state dotted with small towns too tiny to run their own public schools. Over half of the state’s school districts (officially called “school administrative units” or SAUs for short) contract with and pay tuition costs to another nearby school of the parents’ choice—public or private.

And that’s where the hangup lies. By law, Maine mandates that partnering private schools be “nonsectarian in nature, in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” to receive the funding, and three Christian families in the state are challenging the requirement.

The Supreme Court will hear their case, Carson vs. Makin, this week. The decision could set further precedent in defining the distance between church and state and the approach to religious freedom itself, as it makes a distinction between barring public funding due to religious identity of the recipient and barring funding to the religious purpose it would be used to advance.

The families in the case argue that the requirement violates their free exercise of religion since the state bars them “from using their SAUs’ tuition assistance to send their children to religious schools.”

Two of the families, the Carsons and the Gillises, send their children to Bangor Christian School, a primary school whose philosophy is based on educating children “with a biblical worldview.” The other family, the Nelsons, would like to send their daughter to Temple Academy, another Christian school that integrates academic studies with the “truths of Scripture.”

Neither family had actually applied ...