Justices weigh religious school tuition funding

PORTLAND – The question of public funding for students at religious schools was back before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Thursday.

This time, the fight isn’t about school vouchers or payments made by the state to sectarian schools but over whether municipalities can reimburse parents for tuition they have paid to religious schools.

The case arose out of Swans Island’s passage by a 57-44 vote at the 2006 town meeting of the “nondiscrimination family subsidy policy.” The policy allows the town to reimburse parents who live on the island year-round for the cost of sending their children to private schools so long as school tuition is not already being paid by the island’s school administrative unit.

Jason Joyce took advantage of the policy and sent his son to Life Christian Academy, a religious school in Trenton. Last year, after the Maine Civil Liberties Union, an attorney for the Maine Municipal Association and others criticized the policy, the town voted to suspend it.

Joyce sued Swans Island in Kennebec County Superior Court. Justice Janet Mills last year found in the state’s favor, and the family appealed to the state’s high court.

Assistant Attorney General Sarah Forster, who represented the state Thursday, described the policy as “an end run” around the Legislature’s intent not to use public money to pay for religious education.

“In this case,” she said, Swans Island “has done an end run around [the law] by trying to fund exactly what the Legislature clearly sought to prevent.

“This is such a transparent effort to do what this court has twice told the Legislature it can’t do,” Forster told the justices, referring the court’s previous decisions on public funding for religious schools, “that is hard to ignore.”

Stephen Whiting, the Portland attorney representing the Joyce family, said state law prohibits state funds from going to sectarian schools but does not address the question of municipal funds being paid directly to parents for tuition reimbursement.

“The state is misreading the legislation,” he said. “What the Legislature wanted to do was to exclude religious private schools from the state tuition education program. That this court has twice said was legal. The policy doesn’t violate the law because it involves subsidies to families and not payments to religious private schools.”

State law, Whiting argued, doesn’t address what towns can do with their own general funds. Since the law is silent, the policy is not illegal.

Forster said that the Legislature deliberately used the words “public funds” to cover money raised by taxes.

Before 1981, religious private schools could participate in Maine’s education tuition program and receive tuition from local administrative units. The Legislature in 1983 added sectarian schools to the list of categories of private schools that would be excluded from Maine’s education tuition program. The program allows municipalities that do not have their own schools to pay tuition so students living in their community can attend a public or nonreligious school in a community that does.

The legal arguments may not be the issues that were uppermost in residents’ minds when the town passed the policy. Two years ago, tuition at Mount Desert Island Regional High School, the public high school nearest to Swans Island, was about $8,000. Life Christian Academy charged $3,600.

The justices took the matter under advisement. There is no timetable under which they must make their decision.

jharrison@bangordailynews.net

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