A “Sea Change For American Democracy?” – Battle Lines Drawn Over America’s First Religious Public School

It violates Oklahoma state law and Oklahoma’s constitution which forbids the use of taxpayer funds or property from being used, directly or indirectly for the use of any church or religious system.

Nearly six out of ten Oklahoma’s voters said No to a 2016 proposal to remove that language from the state’s Constitution.

Yet, despite state law, the state’s constitution and the will of the voters, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved an application submitted by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City last June that would bring about America’s first taxpayer-funded religious public school.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond had warned the board that creating the school—St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in Oklahoma City—would violate the law and Oklahoma’s constitution. Shortly after the board approval, faith leaders, parents and a public education nonprofit filed a lawsuit challenging the action, condemning it as an attack on religious freedom.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, for his part, called the vote a win for religious freedom.

Now, four months later, the conflict is only intensifying. Earlier this month AG Drummond sued in Oklahoma Supreme Court to block the board from creating and funding the school.

“Make no mistake, if the Catholic Church were permitted to have a public virtual charter school, a reckoning will follow in which this state will be faced with the unprecedented quandary of processing requests to directly fund all petitioning sectarian groups,” the lawsuit states.

Governor Stitt who earlier in 2023 signed a bill releasing taxpayer funds to parents who wish to send their children to private and religious schools, called the Attorney General’s lawsuit a “political stunt.”

“AG Drummond seems to lack any firm grasp on the constitutional principle of religious freedom and masks his disdain for the Catholics’ pursuit by obsessing over non-existent schools that don’t neatly align with his religious preference,” Stitt said in a statement.

This is not the first time the governor and the man who defeated the governor’s pick for attorney general have exchanged barbs. Stitt’s hostile treatment of the state’s Native Americans—vetoing every peace of legislation favorable to them, and thus putting millions of dollars of state revenue at risk—prompted Drummond to remark, “Oklahoma’s relationship with our tribal nations has suffered greatly as a result of the governor’s divisive rhetoric and ceaseless legal attacks.”

The Attorney General’s lawsuit also indicates that the school board’s action could jeopardize more than $1 billion in federal education funding that the state receives in exchange for complying with federal mandates prohibiting a publicly funded religious school.

“Not only is this an irreparable violation of our individual religious liberty, but it is an unthinkable waste of our tax dollars,” Drummond said in a statement.

“It’s hard to think of a clearer violation of the religious freedom of Oklahoma taxpayers and public-school families than the state establishing the nation’s first religious public charter school,” Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement this summer. “This is a sea change for American democracy.”