The United States Supreme Court heard arguments on December 1 on the
permissibility of granting federal educational benefits to religious
schools.
Earlier this year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the
use of federal funds, under a program known as Title VI, to provide
religious schools with books for their libraries, computers for their
classrooms and other "educational or instructional equipment"
is unconstitutional.
In an earlier decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached
a contrary conclusion.
Present for the argument was Abba Cohen, director and counsel of the
Washington Office of Agudas Yisroel of America, which advocates on
behalf of Jewish schools across the nation. Agudah participated in
an amicus curiae brief urging the Court to uphold the program as constitutionally
sound.
Mr. Cohen characterized the Justices as "deeply engaged" in
the issue, which will affect an estimated one million American schoolchildren
currently attending religious schools, and their questions as "incisive."
Mr. Cohen noted that the "wide-ranging and theoretical nature
of the questions" indicated that the "state of the law on
the matter of government aid to students in religious schools is something
of a muddle. Inconsistencies abound and the existing precedents are
therefore less than entirely helpful."
"Hopefully, though," the Agudath Israel representative said,
"that fact itself will guide the Justices to seriously rethink
the fundamentals of the issue and affirm the common-sense notion that
American children in religious schools are entitled to no less governmental
support for their reading, writing and arithmetic than their public
school counterparts."
The controversy surrounding the case, Mitchell vs. Helms dates
back to 1985. It involves a Catholic school in Louisiana that received
publicly funded computers, software and library books for use in the
secular studies curriculum.
A Catholic school student's mother, concerned that her child might
encounter material that had to be "secularized" to comply
with the requirement that the computers and software not be used to
teach religious subjects, sued a representative of the school board
to contest whether the materials ought to have been supplied at all.
A federal program requires public school districts to share instructional
equipment in a "secular, neutral and nonideological" way with
students enrolled in nearby private or parochial schools.
But a federal appeals court in New Orleans last year struck down the
practice, saying that providing educational materials other than textbooks
for religiously affiliated schools violates the separation of church
and state.
The Clinton administration has defended the law, saying the program
has safeguards intended to prevent the equipment and materials from
being diverted for religious use.
The Supreme Court has, in the past, ruled that some materials may
be provided to parochial schools with public funding, while others
may not. The result has been an inconsistent and sometimes confusing
set of rules.
The justices' decision could potentially relate to school voucher
programs, a hot-button issue at the heart of the debate over taxpayer
funding of religious schools and long a source of division in the
Jewish community.
Court observers say it is important to watch whether the justices
decide the case narrowly, in effect "tinkering with the margins"
of how publicly funded materials are supplied to parochial schools,
or hand down a broadly rendered decision.
A ruling in the case is anticipated next spring.
