Nation’s top court to hear blockbuster case on taxpayer funding for Catholic school
Virtual charter school would be the first of its kind in the country

The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether a church-operated charter school with a religious curriculum can be funded fully by taxpayers. The case is destined to be the blockbuster case of the current current term; if the court sides with the Catholic school, whose funding has been approved by a state board in Oklahoma, it would upend constitutional law regarding the separation of church and state.
Although the court in recent years has made it easier for private religious schools to receive limited taxpayer support, generally indirectly through the use of vouchers, the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School would, if allowed by the high court, be the nation’s first parochial school in modern times to also be a public charter school.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the case. Court rulings for decades have restricted taxpayer support for K-12 education to a small percentage of the total education cost or limited it to educational activities that did not focus on religious indoctrination. For example, programs receiving taxpayer support have included ones such as the building of playgrounds, providing transportation, and providing educational support for special-needs children. But the proposed Oklahoma school would fund a full schedule of remote learning provided by a Catholic diocese using the same curriculum and activities that the diocese would use if it were operating the school without taxpayer funding.
Technically, the court will be deciding a pair of consolidated cases, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, which raise similar constitutional issues. The Drummond in the cases is Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, who has called the plan unconstitutional.
Barrett not involved with accepting case
It is not known how many of the court’s nine justices wanted to accept the case; a minimum of four votes were needed. It is known that one justice, Amy Coney Barrett, did not participate in the decision. In scheduling the case, the court gave no reason why Barrett recused herself. It is possible that her decision relates to her connections with Notre Dame Law School, which is involved with providing the proposed charter school with legal representation.
The fact that the high court accepted the case at all suggests that there may be exceptional interest on the high court in tackling the issues the case raises. The Supreme Court is most likely to accept a case when lower courts disagree on the legal issues involved, or when the case was decided at its most recent level on a close vote. But there have been no other recent cases like this one, and the vote of the Oklahoma Supreme Court declaring the school unconstitutional was 6-2.
The Supreme Court will most likely hear the case late this spring and make a decision in June. It set an April 21 deadline to receive the final written legal arguments.
Case is third for this term related to religion
The case is the third religion-related case that the high court has accepted for the current term, and by far the most significant. The others are Catholic Charities Bureau v. State of Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission, which will decide what constitutes a religious activity in a tax dispute, and Mahmoud v. Taylor, which will decide whether parents can opt their children out of certain instruction for religious reasons.
Among the organizations that had submitted or supported the submission of legal briefs urging the high court to accept the case were ones that have frequently been involved in religious-freedom activities. They included the General Counsel of the Assemblies of God, the Buckeye Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Coalition for Jewish Values, the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, and the Religious Freedom Institute. Eight states also asked the high court to hear the case: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.
Two of the largest churches that are frequently involved in religious-liberty debates — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Seventh-day Adventist Church — have not weighed in on the case.
The only organization asking the Supreme Court to reject the case without a hearing was the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Among the groups that have provided legal backing to the school’s opponents are Americans United for Separation of Church and State; and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Split vote vote had created school
Creation of the St. Isidore school was approved by the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board in 2023 on a 3-2 vote and immediately challenged in court.
The high court’s decision later this year will test the limits of Carson v. Makin, a 2022 case in which the court ruled 6-3 that Maine couldn’t refuse to provide vouchers for students to attend a school simply because the school was religious in nature.