The US Supreme Court added a case to their next term that will once again involve “the growing conflict over providing government benefits to private religious schools that refuse to admit or hire LGBTQ students and staff,” reports Education Week:
The case challenges Maine’s “exclusion of religious schools from its program of paying private school tuition for students in communities without high schools,” says EdWeek, which explains that:
The justices granted review in Carson v. Makin (Case No. 20-1088), which involves a quirky type of tuition-assistance program found in just a handful of states but may have implications for religious school choice nationwide. …
The Maine case involves two families who have sought reimbursement for sending their children to religious schools under the state’s long-standing “tuitioning” program, which pays private school fees for students in communities without high schools.
Maine has barred “sectarian” schools from the tuitioning program since 1980, when the state’s attorney general issued an opinion determining that allowing the aid to flow to religious schools that “promote a faith or belief system” would violate the First Amendment’s bar on government establishment of religion. Some nominally religious schools have been approved for the program, including Cardigan Mountain School in New Hampshire, court papers say. The son of Chief Justice Roberts graduated from Cardigan Mountain School a few years ago.
Read the complete EdWeek story here.
Not a subscriber? Sign up today for a free subscription to Boston Spirit magazine, New England’s premier LGBT magazine. We will send you a copy of Boston Spirit 6 times per year and we never sell/rent our subscriber information. Click HERE to sign up!
