Oklahoma approves first religious charter school in US

The nation’s first religious charter school was approved Monday in Oklahoma, marking a victory for Christian conservatives but opening the door to a constitutional battle over whether tax dollars can directly fund religious schools.

The online school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, would be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, with religious teachings embedded in the curriculum, including math and reading. But as a charter school – a kind of public school that is independently run – it would be funded by taxpayers’ money.

After a nearly three-hour meeting, and despite legal counsel concerns, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the school by a 3-2 vote, including a “yes” vote from a new member who was appointed on Friday.

The relatively obscure board consists of appointees from Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican who supports religious charter schools, and leaders of the Republican-controlled legislature.

The approval — which will almost certainly be challenged in court — comes amid wider conservative push to direct taxpayer money to religious schools, including in the form of universal school vouchers, which were approved in five states in the past year. The movement has gained support from recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings, which have increasingly expressed support for spending taxpayers’ money on religious schools.

The Oklahoma decision sets the stage for a high-profile legal battle that could have far-reaching consequences for charter schools, which are part of 8 percent of public schools in the United States.

Opponents had taken a stand against the proposal, arguing that it was a brutal and messy amalgamation of church and state, and one that conflicted with the public nature of charter schools.

St. Isidore organizers hope any legal challenge will force the courts to answer definitively whether public money can be spent directly on religious schools.

“We invite the challenge, for the sake of the country and to answer that question,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which represents the Catholic Church on policy issues and supports the proposal.

In Supreme Court rulings in 2020 and 2022, the court ruled that religious schools could not be excluded from state programs that allowed parents to send their children to private schools using government-funded scholarship or tuition programs. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that while states were not required to support religious education, a state that chooses to subsidize private schools should not discriminate against religious schools.

Supporters in Oklahoma applied similar arguments to St. Isidore, arguing that excluding religious schools from charter funding violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against religious freedom.

“Not only be able to a charter school in Oklahoma would be religious, but indeed it would be illegally prohibited the functioning of such a school’, the organizers of the school wrote in their application.

The move to a religious charter school was opposed by a range of groups, including pastors and religious leaders in Oklahoma, who feared a blurring of the separation of church and state. Leaders of the charter school movement also opposed it.

“Charter schools are conceived as innovative public schools and always have been,” Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in April. She added that charters, like public schools, cannot provide religious instruction.

An important legal question is whether charter schools are “state actors,” representing the government, or “private actors,” more like a government contractor. That question is central to another case, from North Carolina, that the Supreme Court is considering whether to hear.

In Oklahoma, the state board that oversees virtual charter schools has been under intense political pressure, with top state Republicans disagreeing over whether a religious charter school should be allowed.

At a board meeting in April, the board members debated the issue at length and worried whether they would face personal legal trouble over their decision.

With the application approved, St. Isidore, named after the patron saint of the internet, is one step closer to opening.

It would not open until fall 2024 and offer online classes to about 500 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.