Religious Schools Excluded from Rural Tuition Program Despite Supreme Court Decision

A Maine Christian school filed a lawsuit last week to stop the state government from maneuvering around religious liberty protections established by the Supreme Court.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that Maine could not exclude religious schools from its rural tuition program. The program allows school districts that do not have their own high schools to pay tuition for local students to attend either a private high school or a public high school in another district. Bangor Christian School, founded in 1970, participated in the program until 1981, when the state amended the law to require that participating schools be nonsectarian.

In its Carson v. Makin decision last year, the Supreme Court agreed with three families—including two whose children attend Bangor Christian—that Maine’s sectarian exclusion violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Undeterred, Maine pressed ahead—even during the Carson litigation—enacting what challengers have dubbed a “poison pill” by amending the state’s Human Rights Act to add gender identity and religion as protected classes and narrowing the preexisting exemption for religious schools. State law now excludes religious schools from the tuition program unless they agree not to discriminate in hiring and admissions on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. (Excerpt from World.)