© Doug Hoke/The Oklahoman / Usa Today Network
Laura Schuler, senior director for Catholic education at the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, and Michael Scaperlanda, chancellor for the archdiocese, present a proposal for the nation’s first publicly funded Catholic charter school on Feb. 14.

An Oklahoma board approved the nation’s first religious charter school on Monday, agreeing to publicly fund a school where Catholic teachings will be incorporated into lessons throughout the day — and testing the constitutional bounds of taxpayer funding for religious education.

The new online school, called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, will be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. It plans to enroll students in grades K-12 in fall 2024. Religion will be woven into every subject from math and science to history and literature.

Religion is “baked into everything we do,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which handles public policy and government affairs. “Our aim is to continue doing what we’re already doing in Catholic schools.”

The application was approved on a 3-2 vote by the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board.

Almost immediately, the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State said it would challenge the decision in court.

“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,” said Rachel Laser, the group’s president and CEO. “This is a sea change for American democracy.”

Oklahoma Catholics could open the door for religious charter schools

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run and must abide by some of the rules that govern traditional public schools.

The new Catholic school, which expects to serve 500 students initially, was created in part to provide Catholic education for students in rural areas that do not have a private Catholic school nearby. But it also was set up intentionally to test the legal limits of taxpayer funding for religious schools.

The move is part of a conservative push to expand the boundaries of school choice, giving families more taxpayer-funded options for religious education. Farley called this “a watershed moment in the school-choice movement.”

A drive to break down the once-solid wall between public funding and religious education has already made significant gains. Over the past six years, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court has issued three rulings that religious institutions could not be excluded from taxpayer-funded programs that were available to others.

In a 2017 case, the court ruled that a church-run preschool in Missouri was entitled to a state grant that funded playgrounds. In 2020, the court ruled that a Montana could allow parents to use private school vouchers at religious and secular schools. And last year, the court said that a Maine voucher program that sent rural students to private high schools had to be open to religious schools.

Now Oklahoma is testing whether the state can directly fund a religious school.

“The burden of proof is on the opponents of this idea,” argued Farley, of the state’s Catholic Conference. He said opponents will need to show why taxpayer funding for a charter school is different from funding a voucher than also pays for religious education.

“Our contention is it’s a distinction without a difference, and it our view that, given Supreme Court precedent, that argument will hold up,” he said.

But others said that Oklahoma is pressing the point too far.

“This decision runs afoul of state law and the U.S. Constitution. All charter schools are public schools, and as such must be nonsectarian,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group. “The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City is trying to make charter schools into something they are not.”

Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond also decried the decision and said it could open the state to costly litigation.

“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers,” he said. “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars.”

Moriah Balingit contributed to this report.