Supreme Court rules religious schools can get state grants

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court bolstered religious schools on Tuesday, ruling that states that give scholarships or tuition grants to children in private schools may not deny the same aid to parents who enrolled their child in a religious school.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said excluding them amounted to unconstitutional discrimination based on religion and a violation of the First Amendment.

The decision is a victory for advocates of school choice, and a setback for those favoring a strict separation of church and state.

Court scholars said the decision in the Montana case marked the first time the court has ruled states must provide aid to children in religious schools, at least under some circumstances.

Montana, like more than 30 other states, has a longstanding state constitutional provision that forbids using tax money to support churches and their affiliates. On that basis, the state supreme court blocked a state-sponsored scholarship program because it gave $500 grants to low-income parents who sent their children to private and parochial schools.

Kendra Espinoza and two other mothers whose children were enrolled in the Stillwater Christian School in Kalispell, Montana sued with the backing of the Virginia-based Institute for Justice.

“A state need not subsidize private education,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in Espinoza v. Montana, joined by the four other conservative justices. “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

The Constitution “condemns discrimination against religious schools and the families whose children attend them. They are members of the community too and their exclusion from the scholarship program here is ‘odious to our Constitution’ and cannot stand,” he said.

Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, pointed to the anti-Catholic bigotry of the late 19th century, which they said led to the bans on funding “sectarian schools” in most state constitutions. The five conservatives on the court, as well as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, either grew up Catholic or attended Catholic schools.