AG Campbell asks U.S. Supreme Court to reject taxpayer-funded religious charter school (2025)

Should the taxpayers foot the bill for a religious charter school?

That’s the question that will come before the U.S. Supreme Court later this month in a case that could reshape the role of religion in public education.

The answer from Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell and 17 of her colleagues nationwide? An emphatic “no.”

On Monday, Campbell and attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia filed a friend of the court brief in a case asking the nation’s highest court to consider the constitutionality of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in Oklahoma, the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school.

Oklahoma’s Statewide Charter School Board gave the green light in 2023 to the Oklahoma City-based school, which provides religious education and the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic.

A year later, in 2024, the Oklahoma state Supreme Court overturned the regulatory board’s decision, finding it violated state law, as well as Oklahoma’s state constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

The school has yet to open, as the case makes its way through the courts.

Charter schools are public schools run by private operators that receive taxpayer funding. Opponents argued that the school violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

In addition to Massachusetts, attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado (which is leading the charge), Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington also signed the “amicus” brief.

In their brief, Campbell and her colleagues argue that schools such as St. Isidore are not private contractors or religious institutions.

Rather, they remain part of the public school system, which requires them to be open to all students, free of charge, and free of religious instruction.

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The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “firmly rejects the notion of taxpayer-funded religious schools,” Campbell said in a statement.

The school argues the contrary, claiming that it is a private school and that it’s therefore not subject to the constraints of the Establishment Clause.

More, school officials argue that if charter schools are private, then the state’s prohibition on religious charter schools violates the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, barring the government from restricting the “free exercise of religion,” a trio of University of Wisconsin-Madison experts wrote in their analysis of the case.

“Previous Supreme Court cases have found that states cannot prevent private religious entities from participating in generally available government programs solely because they are religious," they wrote.

In their brief, Campbell and her colleagues argued that allowing religious charter schools would “force states into an impossible position” by requiring them to provide religious instruction in standard public schools or to shut down charter programs entirely to avoid running afoul of the Constitution.

The attorneys general further argue that changing the legal status of charter schools could “destabilize” how they’re funded and operated.

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“Many states and key stakeholders rely on charter schools being public institutions, and a ruling that reclassifies them as private could disrupt billions of dollars in public education investment, Campbell and her colleagues argued.

The bottom line?

“The choice of how to structure and govern public schools should remain with the states, not the federal courts, the state attorneys general argued.