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Please let me share that story with you from the good folks at
FAMILY POLICY ALLIANCE. I believe it’s an important one for every believer
who cares about this country and education to know.
President Trump, who supports school choice for children as a
civil rights issue, also issued a statement today in support of the Court’s
decision, saying “no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing
school.”
There hasn’t been much good news from the Supreme Court
lately, but today, five of the Court’s nine justices decided that parents
should be free to choose the best education for their children—and that
includes education in private, faith-based schools.
The Court’s decision today is a win for parents, for religious freedom, and
most importantly—for children. We believe that children win when their
parents can choose the best education for each child, and that no government
should place limitations on a child’s future because of her zip code or her
family’s income.
In 2015, good legislators in the state of Montana passed into law a
tax-credit scholarship program designed to help low-income families,
especially single mothers, send their children to the best schools for
them—including private faith-based schools. The law was written by our
friends at Montana Family Foundation.
Then things started to go wrong. The Montana Department of Revenue issued a
rule saying that children receiving the scholarships could not use them at
faith-based schools. So, three mothers who believed their children would be
better off at faith-based schools filed a lawsuit. Sadly, the Montana Supreme
Court issued an opinion in 2018, stating that it believed Montana’s
Constitution allows the state government to discriminate against faith-based
schools based on a provision historically used to prohibit government funds
from going to faith-based schools (also known as a “Blaine Amendment”), and
it struck down Montana’s good scholarship program.
As the conflict over Montana’s scholarship program reached the Supreme Court,
the Montana Family Foundation, which represents family values in the state,
filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case defending the law on behalf of
Montana’s families.
Family Policy Alliance and the state family policy councils also worked to
gather state lawmakers to file another friend-of-the-court brief in the case
to show the Supreme Court that good lawmakers in other states also want to
advance options for education choice for families.
And now today, the Supreme Court declared that families in
Montana should be free to choose the education that best suits their
children—including in faith-based schools, that the old Blaine Amendment used
to invalidate the scholarship program is bigoted and discriminatory, and that
faith-based schools can’t be disqualified from a school choice program just
because they are faith-based.
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