A coalition of civil rights groups, teachers unions and parents yesterday filed a lawsuit challenging a new Colorado law that allows low-income students attending "unsatisfactory" public schools to attend private or parochial schools at taxpayer expense.
The suit filed in Denver County District Court alleges that the law, enacted earlier this spring, violates a state constitutional ban on public financing of religion. "Religious schools should be funded by their supporters, not the taxpayers," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, part of the coalition challenging the suit.
The Colorado school voucher program is the first in the nation enacted since a Supreme Court decision last June upheld the constitutionality of using public funds to send students to religious schools. Since that ruling, both opponents and supporters of voucher programs have focused on provisions in 47 state constitutions across the country that some analysts believe prohibit public money from flowing to religious institutions.
The Colorado constitution says, in part, that the state and political subdivisions cannot pay public money to support schools "controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever."
Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a civil rights group that helped bring the lawsuit, said that "the language of Colorado's constitution underscores the strong belief of its citizens that taxpayer funds should not be used to subsidize religion." Other groups involved in the suit include the Colorado State Conference of Branches of the NAACP, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Voucher opponents cited state constitutional language in successfully challenging Florida's school voucher program in state court, although the program is continuing while the state appeals last year's court ruling. Voucher opponents also used a similar strategy to block the expenditure of public funds to send students to religious schools in Vermont and Puerto Rico.
The tactic has failed in other states. Challenges to voucher laws or tax credit programs in Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona and Ohio all have been unsuccessful in recent years. And pro-voucher groups have challenged state constitutional provisions barring public money from going to religious schools in Maine, Vermont and Washington state. In those cases, pro-voucher activists have alleged that the provisions are discriminatory because they single out religious schools for exclusion or were passed in the 19th century largely by Protestant lawmakers to stop public funding of Catholic schools.
"Not long before they lost at the U.S. Supreme Court, teachers' unions and other groups opposed to parental choice promised to use every tactic imaginable to block choice programs," said Chip Mellor, president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest law firm that litigates in favor of school choice programs and has promised to join state officials in defending Colorado's law. "It's outrageous that their tactics include propping up religious bigotry."
