The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing or promoting a religion. In this sense, it provides for a separation between church and state. How separate they are, though, continues to evolve.
A trilogy of U.S. Supreme Court cases—Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), and Carson v. Makin (2022)—have re-shaped historic interpretations of the First Amendment that prohibit states from denying public benefits to religious organizations simply because it is religious, and allow for state-funded private school choice to be used by families to attend faith-based schools.
In Oklahoma, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa applied for a charter to operate a virtual charter school called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School that was to offer a curriculum rooted in the Catholic faith. This application was approved in June 2023 for a Fall 2024 opening. The Oklahoma Attorney General challenged the application’s approval on church-state grounds. In 2024, the state Supreme Court directed St. Isidore’s charter to be rescinded.
This case advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court. Though Oklahoma charter schools are public schools in that they are state-supported, tuition-free, open-enrollment institutions subject to state oversight, at issue is whether these schools are “state actors” that are prohibited from promoting or establishing a religion. A ruling that charter schools in Oklahoma—and potentially elsewhere—are not state actors could have implications beyond the First Amendment.
St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond is a landmark case for the national charter schools community. It is the first time that the U.S. Supreme Court has heard a case on charter schools, and is being closely watched by the charter legal community.
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