The separation of church and state was a founding principle in the United States. Despite this, the U.S. Supreme Court, now stacked with a conservative supermajority, has signaled that it may further erode the separation of church and state in schools in the country.
In a court case that the Supreme Court weighed in on Wednesday, Maine families have challenged the state’s unusual method of providing public education. The state has so many rural areas that some school districts do not have enough of a condensed population to have their own high school.
To handle this, the state has contracted existing high schools to accept students from districts that do not have a high school. This includes paying the same amount to nonsectarian private schools to pick up students. The state will not pay the same tuition for private religious schools.
Some have tried to find ways to include religious schools in taxpayer funding. Now with a conservative Supreme Court, they may succeed. Five of the six conservative judges attended private religious schools and have been advocates for them in the past.
Fighting against including religious schools in the taxpayer fund are the court’s liberals, who argued that in the past the court has ruled that states can institute voucher programs that allow parents to send children to religious schools. They say this case is different because it is asking the court to contend that the state must treat religious schools in the same manner as nonsectarian schools, which goes against the separation of church and state.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal members said that the existing program does treat everyone equally, as it provides free public school for all, and allows parents to individually choose if they prefer a religious private education. This should not be up to the taxpayer to provide, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued.
Experts have worried that this will be an underpinning to the separation of church and state in education.
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