Vouchers spur lawsuit against state 6 families want tuition to religious schools paid

PORTLAND – In the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to spend public funds on students attending sectarian schools, six southern Maine families have joined in a lawsuit to force the state to pay for their children’s religious education.

Filed Wednesday in Cumberland County Superior Court, the suit seeks to overturn a 1981 Maine law prohibiting the use of publicly funded vouchers at religious schools.

Plaintiffs are residents of Minot, Durham and Raymond, towns which don’t have high schools and provide tuition vouchers for students to attend school elsewhere.

Five of the families send their children to Saint Dominic Regional High School, a Catholic school in Auburn. Another child, whose family is Seventh Day Adventist, attends Pine Tree Academy in Freeport.

The case is similar to the 1997 Bagley case in which several Raymond families unsuccessfully argued the state was discriminating against them by refusing to pay their sons’ tuition to a Catholic school in Portland.

But Richard Komer of the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., said families now have additional ammunition thanks to last June’s Supreme Court ruling which upheld a Cleveland, Ohio, school voucher program allowing parents to send their children to private schools, including religious institutions, at taxpayer expense.

The landmark decision prompted at least one of the plaintiffs to be included in the latest suit. Jill Guay of Minot said Wednesday over the phone that she and her husband Lionel feel “we have more of a leg to stand on to possibly change the Maine law.”

The family pays $4,800 a year for their daughter, Ashley, to attend St. Dominic, according to Guay. That’s less than their town pays to send students to Poland Regional High School where the majority of Minot eighth graders go, she said.

Assistant Attorney General Sarah Forster said Wednesday she hadn’t yet seen the lawsuit, but that Attorney General Steven Rowe has already stated that the Supreme Court decision didn’t apply to Maine since it didn’t mandate that a state was required to fund sectarian education.

“Our job is to defend the laws of Maine, and so that’s what we’re going to do,” she said.

Komer said Maine’s laws violate the federal constitution because they discriminate against families who choose religious schools. “The state’s the bad guy here,” he said. “It’s not the towns. Most of the towns would happily pay because they recognize it’s unfair.”

In Bagley, the Maine Supreme Court concluded the state’s only justification for excluding religious schools from the tuition program was the federal establishment clause separating church and state, said Komer.

With the Supreme Court decision, “that’s gone now,” he said.

Maine towns paid tuition to religious schools until 1980 when residents questioned the idea of taxpayer money paying tuition at Bangor’s John Bapst Memorial High School, then a Catholic institution.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office subsequently issued an opinion stating that spending public funds on religious education violated the U.S. Constitution.

In 1981, the Legislature enacted a law prohibiting the expenditure of public funds on sectarian schools. These rulings forced Bapst to become secular.

Litigation isn’t the only way to re-enact the pre-1980 voucher tuition law.

Rep. Kevin Glynn, R-South Portland, said this summer he plans to co-sponsor a voucher bill next year.

The lawmaker said he is working with a group of about 30 people, including legislators, educators, parents and members of the Maine School Choice Coalition, hoping to draft “one quality piece of legislation.”

Meanwhile, Komer said he hoped to “either have won the lawsuit or be at the Maine Supreme Court” before the school year ends.