JNS
"The government can’t say, ‘We’re going to create this program and we’re going to give out all this money, but don’t even ask for the money if you’re religious,’” Nick Reaves, of Becket, told JNS.
Last October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled that it was unlawful for the state to block funds, which are earmarked for children with special needs, from being used in religious private schools, including Jewish ones. California and the Loffmans, an Orthodox Jewish family that sued the state, agreed on Monday to settle the case.
Nick Reaves, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which helped file the case, told JNS the case “reaffirms the principle that the Supreme Court has been driving towards for a couple of years now,” that “we live in a pluralistic society, and the government cannot exclude people from the public square just because of their religion or just because they are religious.”
“The government can’t say, ‘We’re going to create this program and we’re going to give out all this money, but don’t even ask for the money if you’re religious,’” he said.
The agreement is “a moment in time that we’re going to remember in the history of advocacy for Jewish education and for children with special needs in this country,” Dan Mitzner, director of government affairs at Teach Coalition, a project of the Orthodox Union, told JNS.
“It’s sealing the deal with something we’ve been working on for years,” he said.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides federal funding for special education programs in public schools, and federal and state laws allow that funding to be used in private and charter schools. Until the recent suit, California excluded religious private schools from that funding.
Reaves told JNS the state education department may not have intended to engage in religious discrimination with its policy.
“There was no kind of ‘smoking gun’ or statement saying, ‘We’re doing this because we don’t like religious people, or because we don’t like Jewish people,’” he said.
“Sometimes state and federal bureaucrats might think that we have this provision in the First Amendment that says the government shall not establish a religion, so we have to keep religion away,” he continued.
The Establishment Clause in the Constitution, which bars the government from promoting, endorsing or funding religion, is often misunderstood, according to Reaves.
“The reason why California adopted this policy is rooted in a misunderstanding of what the Constitution requires, and the courts have, over time, been trying to fix that,” he said. “This case is evidence that they are moving in the right direction.”
Mitzner told JNS that before the ruling, some Orthodox Jewish children with special needs had to travel out of state to receive the care they needed. The settlement means that there will be help, finally, for “the kids that are the most vulnerable,” he said.
“This is a major paradigm shift in how our children will get educated,” he told JNS.
