Set against 55 closures or consolidations that also took place — the lowest number in years, according to from the National Catholic Education Association — total student enrollment managed to hold steady from the previous year. Just stopping the bleeding is considered a good omen in more than 3.5 million pupils, or two-thirds of its headcount, since the 1960s. 

The sustained drop in demand for Catholic education reflects a combination of broad changes in American society, including the Church’s gradual decline in membership and the migration of many of its congregants away from major cities, where diocesan schools have historically found eager customers. But new research implicates a much more recent variable: the swift rise of charter schooling since the 1990s.

In , a team of academics from Boston College’s demonstrated a clear link between the opening of new charter schools and substantial declines in enrollment at nearby Catholic schools. Between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of students left their Catholic school within two years of a charter opening nearby, according to the paper’s authors. As the number of families transfering to charters grew, the Catholic establishments became significantly more likely to close.

The findings provide the first national overview of a competition that has changed the complexion of school choice over the last quarter-century. Though the parochial footprint was charters arrived on the scene, the sector’s advocates awakened quickly to losing to a novel alternative with plenty of political and philanthropic support behind it. 

Boston College Professor Shaun Dougherty, the paper’s lead author, said that the tenuous fiscal position of many Catholic parishes made declining enrollments a serious threat to their ability to survive. 

“It seems like the margins of these schools are pretty thin,” Dougherty said. “In general, budgetary management is a challenge for a lot of parish schools, but the loss of income is catastrophic in many instances.”

But if the research paints a clear picture of the last few decades, it will be an uncertain guide to the next few. After years of unchecked spread, charter growth through the end of the 2010s as in Democratic-leaning states and cities. Meanwhile, a stampede of red states has rushed to enact statewide systems of school vouchers or education savings accounts, which provide families money to spend on the private school of their choice — including religious options.

Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said that it would take decisive action on the part of Catholic schools to alter their long-running downward trajectory. So many campuses have been shuttered over the heyday of charter growth that dioceses can’t simply flip a switch and restore the capacity they enjoyed during the Clinton administration, when school voucher programs were still a far-off possibility.

“If we’d gotten this much of private school choice in 1999, instead of 25 years later, we might have a lot more kids in Catholic schools today,” Garnett said. “So the question is what will happen now: Will they come back? Will the Church take advantage of these resources to reopen schools?”

Reaction to abuse scandals

Doughterty’s study is one of the first to examine the national sweep of the Catholic education sector across the country, with data collected from over 10,000 Catholic and 15,000 charter schools. After mapping the distances between the two school types, he and his co-authors calculated the effect on Catholic institutions of a charter school opening for the first time within a five-mile radius. 

Quickly after being exposed to charter competition, Catholic schools lost about 10 students, or more than 3 percent of their total enrollment. Those departures increased with time and helped drive the unwinding of some Catholic options. For each successive year in operation, the existence of a charter raised the chance that a K–8 Catholic school would close by between 1 and 3.5 percentage points.

Departures were not driven by competitive pressure alone, however. At the same time that charter growth was exploding in major cities, in a decades-long scandal involving the sexual abuse of minors. Schools in dioceses throughout the U.S. , while costly settlements that might have cushioned the blow from disenrollments. 

A , released last year by Bates College economist Kyle Coombs, found strong evidence of a link between abuse cases, Catholic school closures, and charter school openings. Gathering news accounts of over 3,000 such scandals between 1980 and 2010, Coombs discovered that within six years of sexual abuse being reported in news media, Catholic schools in the area where the event took place lost an average of 75 students and were hit by an uptick in closures. 

Over the same period, Coombs discovered, charter schools — but not traditional public or non-Catholic private schools — gained an average of 50 students, strongly indicating that families who previously favored Catholic education might also prefer the charter experience. 

Coombs said that both his study and the one circulated by Boston College were uncovering parts of the same story: At the same time that families were being pulled away from their traditional preferences for parochial schools, they were also being pushed out by accounts of misconduct.  

“In these instances, it takes a little while, but it’s not shocking that when one school closes, another one opens,” Coombs said. “And of course it’s not shocking that the most prevalent type of school to open is the type that is the fastest-growing in the United States.”

Further, he found that in areas with Catholic schools, new charters were considerably more likely to open in places where a scandal had been reported than in places where they had not. That trend suggests that charters were being strategic in expanding to areas where students might suddenly be up for grabs.

Coombs said it was likely that charter operators had taken notice of the ongoing migration away from urban Catholic schools.

“When the scandals occur, that’s something that can lead to a drop in Catholic school enrollments,” he said. “And charter schools, if they are looking for places where there’s need, would see that.”

‘A totally new world now’

Notably, Dougherty and his colleagues found, the tie between charter growth and Catholic school decline is stronger in some areas than others.

In the 10 jurisdictions that offered some form of voucher or tuition reimbursement program to families, such as Indiana, Maine, and Washington, D.C., the impact of new charters on Catholic school enrollments and closure rates was smaller than in those without any form of private school choice. The difference is likely a sign that parents’ decisions are motivated, at least partially, by their finances. 

Dougherty said that, notwithstanding the “strong attachments” many families felt to their local Catholic school, the availability of a no-cost alternative could prove decisive. 

“The potential savings to a family of switching from an urban Catholic school to an urban charter could be substantial, even if they were only paying a few thousand dollars per year in tuition,” Dougherty said. “Getting a few thousand dollars back seems like a fairly large benefit.”

Yet the existence of universal, high-dollar systems of private school choice, such as the education savings accounts that have been approved in a dozen states over the last few years, could level the playing field considerably. Dougherty observed that, depending on the state, the value of an ESA would likely go farther to cover costs at a Catholic institution — the sector has healthy discounts — than at other independent schools.

The Church has been increasingly willing to embrace new K–12 models, albeit at a pace one might expect of a 2,000-year-old entity. During the headiest days of the school choice era, some dioceses allowed schools with an emphasis on character education. In New York City and Cleveland, 11 Catholic programs by a charter-like management organization known as Partnership Schools (this school year, responsibility for day-to-day operations in the New York schools to the local archdiocese). 

Garnett said she was heartened by the apparently positive impact of voucher-type programs on Catholic school retention, especially given how paltry those schemes were until 2020. Many were granted only to certain subgroups, such as students with special needs or those attending failing schools, and they were not always user-friendly, she added.

Before the advent of universal ESA systems, “the amounts given to families were less, the number of families who could participate was smaller, so the fact that there was any effect is telling,” Garnett said. “But we’re in a totally new world now.”

OKLAHOMA CITY — A contract founding the nation’s first religious charter school is now void, but it could be reestablished if the U.S. Supreme Court were to rule in favor of the school. 

In its fourth time considering the measure, the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board finally agreed on Monday to rescind its contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, effectively blocking the school from opening as a state-funded entity. St. Isidore, named for the patron saint of the internet, had already agreed not to attempt to open nor accept public funding in the 2024-25 school year.

The on June 25 that the concept of a publicly funded, state-established school that endorses a religion is unlawful and unconstitutional. In doing so, the Court ordered the state board to invalidate St. Isidore’s founding charter contract. 

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, which created the school, . Advocates for St. Isidore say denying the school of public funds because it is Catholic violates the right to religious freedom.

The board’s unanimous vote on Monday included a provision to reinstate the contract if the U.S. Supreme Court “reverses, vacates or otherwise nullifies” the state Supreme Court’s ruling. Father Stephen Hamilton, pastor of St. Monica Catholic Church in Edmond, prays before a meeting of the Statewide Charter School Board on Aug. 12 at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. (Photo by Nuria Martinez-Keel/Oklahoma Voice)

The Statewide Charter School Board had declined multiple times to void the contract, . The board’s cooperation with Catholic officials was evident again on Monday when it had Father Stephen Hamilton, of St. Monica Catholic Church in Edmond, pray at the beginning of its meeting.

Chairperson Brian Shellem said the board was waiting for an appeals window to close and for further clarification from the Court on the ruling. He said last month that the board intended to follow the Court order but didn’t want to “short circuit” the legal process.

“Our board is always going to be in compliance with a court order,” Shellem said after Monday’s meeting. “Now, there’s those who wanted to rush the process, but there was a process and this board will always respect the process.”

Shellem said an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet been filed.

The odds are long that the nation’s highest court will take up the case. The U.S. Supreme Court a year to review cases, of which it agrees to hear about 100 to 150.

Meanwhile, pressure to rescind the contract mounted from Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who sued to strike down the school. Drummond asked the state Supreme Court to threaten a contempt citation against the board members if they again refused to follow the order in their meeting Monday. 

Anyone held in contempt of a court order could face a fine of up to $500 or imprisonment up to six months, or both, according to state law.

“While it is appalling that the board took so long to recognize the authority of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, I am pleased that board members finally fulfilled their duty,” Drummond said in a statement after the meeting. “The proposed state-sponsored religious charter school, funded by our tax dollars, represents a serious threat to the religious liberty of all four million Oklahomans.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com. Follow Oklahoma Voice on and .

His mother and father, who immigrated illegally to St. Louis before he was born, returned to Mexico when he was still in middle school. It was a necessary step — back in their hometown, Joseph’s grandmother was homebound and badly in need of care — but it left him alone with the choice of where to enroll after he graduated from , the Hispanic-majority Catholic school he’d attended since his elementary years. 

He moved in with his older sister and brother-in-law, who were happy to drive him to school interviews and open houses. Yet he was still faced with the complexity of the city’s sprawling Catholic education sector, which serves thousands of families as an alternative to the chronically struggling St. Louis public school district. 

Each choice bore a heady price tag and an unfamiliar name: Christian Brothers College High School, Chaminade College Preparatory School, St. John Vianney High School. “I had no idea what high school to go to,” Joseph remembered. “I didn’t even know all these schools existed.” 

Fortunately, he’d been dealt a trump card before the process even began. Beginning in sixth grade, Joseph participated in , a nonprofit initiative that provides hundreds of St. Louis-area students with after-school activities, high school and postsecondary counseling and financial assistance. Embedded in three Catholic middle schools, including St. Cecilia’s, Access Academies staffers help families send their children to the schools they want and make sure they stay on track to succeed after graduation. In total, the program has awarded $9 million in scholarships since its founding in 2005. 

Perhaps more importantly, it offers a model of intensive support that bolsters local institutions while helping profoundly disadvantaged children transition to adulthood. Across St. Louis, live below the poverty line — more than double the national average — while fewer than one-quarter of all K–12 students can read or do math at grade level. In a city that has for not helping young people to thrive, the aid provided by Access Academies allows families to choose their next steps without having to decamp for the suburbs. 

Participating students — about 500 currently, distributed among middle schools, high schools, and universities — receive benefits ranging from tutoring to summer academies to care packages in their college dorms. And to a large extent, , with 97 percent of Access Academies students graduating high school on time;93 percent are accepted to a post-secondary institution. 

Above all, said Shelly Williams, Access Academies’ executive director, they get the chance to see the possibilities that await them outside their neighborhoods and nearby schools.

“A lot of our kids simply don’t have that opportunity, whether they’re in charter or public schools,” Williams said. Whether or not a student happens to live in one of St. Louis’s prosperous neighborhoods is “sort of the indicator of whether you have access to opportunity,” she added.

Joseph is now a freshman at Saint Louis University, deciding between majoring in business or engineering. Five years after his largely self-directed high school search, he said the organization laid a path to his success in college and beyond.

“Access was feeding me information, like: ‘This high school is good, this high school is also good. What’s the difference between both of them?’ And it wasn’t ever a financial problem because they could help me.”

Staying ‘10 steps ahead’

Many St. Louis parents are just as daunted by the high school and college application processes as Joseph was in eighth grade.

The local K–12 menu is overstuffed with options, including traditional neighborhood schools, charters and a few highly regarded magnet programs. To make things even more complicated, St. Louis is home to one of the largest Catholic school sectors in the country — the city was founded by French settlers and named after a Catholic saint — and for over a century, the Archdiocese of St. Louis has of pupils in both the city and surrounding St. Louis County.

Families historically opted for private or parochial schools out of necessity as well as religious devotion. St. Louis Public Schools has long been one of the most troubled school systems in the country, routinely posting dreadful standardized test scores even before the learning catastrophe of COVID-19. In just over 50 years, the district lost 85 percent of its students, and the vast majority of those left are poor.

But the cost of going private can be prohibitive. Annual tuition at the highly regarded (and secular) John Burroughs School, which produced Mad Men star Jon Hamm and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, $35,000. The comparatively cheap Nerinx Hall, a Catholic girls school in suburban Webster Groves, over $18,000 to attend this year.

Access Academies offers substantial financial aid to participating families, in high school scholarships and secondary costs (application, uniform, and technology fees can also be steep) last year. The organization also works directly with high schools to negotiate discounts for families that still struggle with the bill.

But Williams said that logistical help can be no less crucial, especially as students begin to survey their prospects after high school. The procedural obstacles woven into the college search, including arranging campus visits and wrangling tax documents to complete financial aid forms, from enrolling in college every year. 

“It’s layers and layers of things, and there needs to be someone here to help them navigate those layers and stay on top of the laws, which are constantly changing,” Williams said, noting that the federal financial aid form this year. “We have to stay 10 steps ahead of all the systems, try to prepare our families in the meantime and be emotionally supportive too.”

Both raw application numbers and public opinion polling show that interest in college has declined somewhat since the pandemic, but in Missouri, the trend seems to go back a decade or more. According to from Saint Louis University’s Policy Research in Missouri Education Center, the rate of Missourians immediately enrolling in either a two- or four-year college after graduating high school fell from 69 percent in 2011 to 62 percent in 2019. When then-Gov. Eric Greitens eliminated state funding for high school juniors to sit for the ACT, the rate of students taking that exam fell by 15 percentage points.

Access Academies requires its students to take the ACT and provides a free preparatory course on Saturday mornings. It also hosts bilingual seminars on how to fill out financial aid forms (dubbed “FAFSA Frenzies”) and pushes students to identify schools or vocational programs that interest them in their early high school years. 

The strategy is specifically tailored for the kids served by Access. Carolyn Dubuque, the organization’s director of mission effectiveness, said that many of the private schools in the area expect students to take the initiative in contacting their college offices. But students like Joseph, who was a starting forward on his high school soccer team, helped look after five nieces and nephews, and worked a construction job in his senior year, may not be prepared to do that. 

“You can’t spit in St. Louis and not hit a Catholic high school,” Dubuque observed. “But these Catholic high schools are not designed for our kids — underserved, first-generation students.”

Each Access Academies middle school (St. Cecilia’s and St. Louis Catholic Academy in St. Louis proper, as well as Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School in East St. Louis, Illinois) is staffed with graduate support directors who follow all of the program’s students throughout their time in high school. If the students wish to, they may continue to receive services — including counseling and “micro-scholarships” tied to GPA and career benchmarks — while enrolled in college.

Amy Clark, Access’s director of college and career initiatives, said that her job often involved cajoling high schoolers and their parents to keep working through a nasty labyrinth of paperwork and email portals.

“A lot of the help isn’t us making magic happen,” Clark said. “It’s: ‘Open up your email with me, and let’s go through this. Don’t be overwhelmed with this form, let’s just get it submitted.’” 

‘Engaging with an existing community’

Admissions essays and summer internships seem like distant concepts at Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School. 

In part, that’s because of its setting. East St. Louis, which looks out at the hopeful curve of the Gateway Arch from just across the Mississippi River, is and most crime-plagued communities. The most recent issued by Illinois shows that just 13 percent of the local school district’s students scored proficient in reading in 2023, while less than 6 percent scored proficient in math. 

Situated on a quiet stretch of the aptly named Church Lane, the school exudes a placid feel. On a Thursday afternoon just before Thanksgiving, the walls were bedecked with pictures of prominent Catholics, including that of Sister Thea herself, a who evangelized to African Americans through music and dance. The building recently finished a multi-year effort to install soundproof windows that, according to the school’s advancement director, could withstand a chunk of asphalt being dropped on them — which is nearly 10 years ago to the ones they replaced. 

At 3:00, neat lines of kindergartners and elementary schoolers trooped homeward for the day. Once they left, middle schoolers poured into their after-school activities, and the hallways began to echo with the sounds of music lessons and word problems.

Access Academies’ contact with students begins with supplementary offerings for sixth and seventh graders, who choose among dozens of enrichment programs including cooking, public speaking, robotics and sewing. Eighth graders are increasingly steered toward researching and applying to high schools, but they are also free to take part.

In one classroom, Sara Mullins, a volunteer with the local nonprofit , gently worked with eight pupils as they plinked on electronic keyboards. Down the hall, Sister Thea Bowman alumnus Paris Grimmett walked a larger group through the differences between checking and savings accounts as part of his personal finance education program, . Annamary King, a math instructor who also offers free tutoring to high schoolers struggling at their next destination, explained to her math club, the PI-thons.

“When the sixth graders realize they’re going to be staying until five o’clock, their reaction is, ‘Do we really have to do this?’” said Mary McGeathy, the school’s former principal and a current reading instructor. “But when they get into it, there are very few complaints.”

Enrollment in St. Louis-area Catholic schools has eroded over the last two decades, and after multiple closures, Sister Thea Bowman is the last one remaining in East St. Louis. Its student body, which hovered around 80 in the early 2000s, numbers more than 100 today, even after COVID dealt a to the Catholic sector nationwide. 

Williams, the Access Academies executive director, said that the original aim of the organization was to put down roots in established schools that might otherwise be vulnerable, rather than presenting local communities with a potted reform.

“The idea was to strengthen the communities where they were instead of creating anew,” Williams said. “If you’re engaging with an existing community and listening to what they’re saying, people will absorb and participate in that differently.”

The school’s partnership with Access Academies has helped attract and retain families who might have otherwise slipped away. Along with the cost-free enrichment and mentoring, middle schoolers have become eligible for scholarships that will allow them to continue attending private schools after they graduate — a major attraction for parents. In prior years, eighth graders largely matriculated either to the local public high school or a handful of other Catholic alternatives in nearby Belleville and Waterloo. Now a sizable majority cross the river to attend schools in Missouri, even if they have to take multiple buses to commute. 

Carmelita Spencer, a former math and science teacher at Sister Thea Bowman, now works as the school’s Access Academies graduate support director. A proud native of East St. Louis, she nevertheless harbored hopes that the availability of scholarships and counseling would open students’ minds to the possibility of attending school somewhere other than their hometown. 

Now she spends most days on the road, crisscrossing between high schools to arrange meetings with her students and their teachers. The constant driving puts more miles on her car — an old loaner from her sister — but she relishes the chance to advocate for her old elementary schoolers.

“I know my students’ abilities, so it’s easier for me to advocate for them when it’s time for them to go to high school,” Spencer said. “I have students who struggle, and I’m able to go the school and say, ‘We need to put special support in place for this student.'”

Making ‘that dream come true’

In some ways, Remy and Giovanni Valenzuela need less than the typical Access Academies student in the way of special support. For one thing, they’ve got each other to lean on.

The brothers are both seniors at St. Mary’s High School, just a few minutes from their home in South St. Louis. The school has served local families as a neighborhood institution for the better part of a century; Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, the son of Italian immigrants, attended in the 1930s.

Remy and Gio are succeeding in their classes while juggling evening shifts as a dishwasher and line cook at a local Olive Garden. They are also making plans to attend college this fall — acceptance letters have arrived from Central Michigan University and the University of Wyoming, as well as local options Maryville University and Fontbonne University — and have long planned to join the Army or Marines, following a path traveled by their parents, grandfathers and a slew of cousins.

But even while crediting their own diligence and attentive parents, both acknowledge that they might not be in the same enviable position without the help of Access Academies. The boys only moved to St. Cecilia’s in second grade after Remy, the older brother by a year, struggled to pick up math at a well-regarded magnet school. Their mother, Kim, worried that his academic needs wouldn’t be met without more support and smaller class sizes.

During their time in middle and high school, the brothers took advantage of the benefits available to all Access students: afterschool enrichment, financial aid, admissions counseling, and multiple practice runs at the ACT (which Gio credits with lifting his score from 18 to 25 out of a possible 36). But their graduate support directors also pushed them to enjoy the aspects of high school that make the hard work worthwhile.

“I wrestled and lost a ton of weight because of it,” Gio said. “I became the secretary of the National Honors Society this year. Access was willing to help pay for my clubs and my college-credit classes. And they were able to take the strain off our parents so that we could actually enjoy our time in high school.”

Kim Valenzuela is spread thin as a mother, nurse and occasional caregiver to her husband’s parents, who live with the family. She said the years of assistance provided by Access gave her the assurance that her sons would find their way in a city where too many young men fail to reach college or a productive career.

A recent parent meeting took her back to St. Cecilia’s, where she sat in a room covered in the names of Access students and the high schools they wished to attend. On one wall were Remy and Gio’s names and their hoped-for destination, St. Mary’s, which they’d scrawled as sixth graders. Kim said the ritual, and the memory it evoked of her sons as pre-teens, encapsulated what the program helps families like hers achieve.

“They want to know what your plan is for high school and college,” she said. “You lay this plan out, and they help you make that dream come true.”

As the Texas Legislature debates school vouchers, one of the staunchest supporters of the initiative has been the Catholic Church.

Texas Catholic leaders have been among the longest-running advocates for Gov. ’s top current legislative priority, which would allow parents to use taxpayer money for private education expenses. That’s true even as some other religious leaders have firmly opposed the legislation.

Why are they divided? Catholic leaders say other religious leaders don’t fully appreciate the voucher program’s benefits, particularly its potential to expand access to private education. Voucher critics say Catholic leaders are acting in the interest of their own schools, which have experienced declining enrollment for decades, while promoting a program that could harm public schools.

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A voucher program would give parents the opportunity to choose a religious education regardless of their income level, said Jennifer Allmon, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, which oversees all 254 Catholic schools in Texas.

“It’ll take a few years, but our primary hope is that it will open the doors of our schools to even more low-income families and provide even greater access for those who wish to use Catholic schools for the education of their children,” Allmon said.

Historic enrollment decline

Aside from a post-pandemic surge, Catholic school enrollment has been declining nationwide since the late 1960s, . In 2021, Catholic schools across the country saw the largest single-year decrease in enrollment in more than 50 years.

Texas has not escaped the trend. From 2019-22, enrollment at Catholic schools in the state fell by more than 5,000 students, or 7.6%. Only four states had sharper declines. Eight Catholic schools in Texas closed during the pandemic, Allmon said.

But, she added, Texas Catholic schools saw an uptick in enrollment among high-income families during the pandemic — which she said underscores the need for a voucher program to help low-income families afford religious education.

“In the 2021 to 2022 school year, because we opened up in-person and didn’t have mask requirements in most places, families with means had choice, and they used it,” Allmon said. “And the low-income lost their spots because their income took a dip.”

The Texas Catholic Conference, which , has pressed for no limits on the number of low-income families supported by a voucher program.

, passed by the Texas Senate on Oct. 12, “no more than” 40% of spots in the program are reserved for students who receive free or reduced lunch and “no more than” 30% to families who earn between 185% and 500% of the federal poverty line. , however, low-income students with disabilities and places no limit on how many of the education savings accounts can go to these underprivileged students — which is why the Catholic conference supports the House version, Allmon said.

More than 62,000 students were enrolled in Texas Catholic schools in the 2021-22 school year, according to the Texas Catholic Conference. In a 2022 survey, the conference found 16,832 vacancies in 122 Catholic schools — with an average of 109 open seats in grade schools and 60 in high schools.

Lois Goudeau, head of St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School in Humble, said her pre-K through 8th grade school currently enrolls 365 students but has capacity for 25 more. The church’s Catholic Christian Education program, an after-school religious education class, has about 800 students, so Goudeau believes more families in her community would seek Catholic education if not for the tuition barrier.

Education savings accounts, the school voucher program being debated by the Legislature, would provide families with state money to help pay for private school tuition and other education expenses. SB1 would give families $8,000 annually, while HB1 would give them 75% of the average amount their public school receives in per-student funding.

On average, Allmon said, annual Catholic school tuition in the state is $6,800 for grade schools and $10,300 for high schools. St. Mary’s tuition is $6,000, Goudeau said.

“We hope that we get a boost from [vouchers] because enrollment in a lot of our private schools, particularly Catholic schools, has been down over the past few years because people don’t have that expendable money, and they’re not looking to spend it on tuition for their students,” Goudeau said. “It is something that the archdiocese and all of our schools and our organizations have been pushing for.”

Questions over church-state separation

For some voucher critics, funneling taxpayer dollars to religious schools raises concerns about the separation of church and state.

The Texas Constitution prohibits using money from the state treasury “for the benefit of any sect, or religious society, theological or religious seminary.” However, in a 2022 religious discrimination case, the that tuition assistance programs, or school vouchers, must include religious schools if they are available to nonreligious private schools.

The ruling was a major win for pro-voucher religious schools and leaders, but opponents say it raises thorny issues when people’s tax dollars are sent to religious institutions that have beliefs they do not share.

“As a Baptist, I don’t believe in the infallibility of the Pope like my Catholic friends, nor do I believe in the veneration of marriage like my Catholic friends,” said Charles Johnson, a Baptist pastor and executive director of Pastors for Texas Children, which opposes vouchers. “I don’t want to pay for those two teachings in Catholic schools.”

Johnson said his organization represents almost 1,000 churches that share these concerns.

But Allmon said there is a long tradition in Texas of partnerships between the government and religious groups. Texas provides that parents can use at religiously affiliated day care centers and that college students can use at private religious universities.

“We’ve not had any government intrusion or problems in either of those two sectors,” Allmon said. “It’s worked perfectly well to have that partnership for kids under 5 and people 18 and over, so it’s just a matter of applying it to kids 5 to 18.”

Goudeau said her concern with a voucher program would be government intrusion into the private school admissions process. Voucher critics that selective private school admissions may keep special needs or other underprivileged students out of these schools, even if they were selected for a voucher.

SB1 bars the state from taking any measures to regulate the curriculum, admissions or religious values of private schools that enroll students with vouchers.

A student’s potential for academic success and adherence to the school’s Catholic standards are both factors in the admissions process at St. Mary’s, Goudeau added. Along with typical grade-school classes, St. Mary’s students attend religion class daily and mass weekly.

“If we’re allowed to continue operating as we do now, we wouldn’t just accept every kid anyway,” Goudeau said.

A complicated divide

Twenty years ago, church-state separation was the primary concern for religious leaders who oppose vouchers, said Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Impact, an interfaith advocacy group fighting vouchers. But more recently, she said, leaders and congregation members have joined Texas Impact primarily over worries that a voucher program would .

“The conversation has gotten much more dire,” she said. “People see this as not just a preference for not using tax dollars to subsidize religious education. They see it as … a nail in the coffin of public schools.”

Erik Gronberg, the Lutheran bishop of the Northern Texas-Northern Louisiana Synod, said he has taken particular issue with Abbott recruiting religious leaders to advocate for the program. Earlier this month, the governor, who is Catholic, declared a “” and joined a handful of religious leaders across denominations to host a virtual town hall in support of vouchers.

“He was trying to encourage pastors to speak in favor of vouchers and that, from my perspective, was a real crossing of the line,” Gronberg said. “We are called to advocate for justice. We’ve got to advocate for the poor and marginalized. We’re called to talk about issues as they arise, but this is clearly a very partisan issue and something that is very near and dear to his heart.”

Still, some non-Catholic religious schools see merit in a voucher program. Chrystal Bernard, head of Braveheart Christian Academy, oversees a 20-student school founded in 2021 that primarily serves students of color.

Many Braveheart students come from low-income families, Bernard said, and the school has a program allowing parents to volunteer in exchange for tuition discounts. Still, the discounts are modest, and not all families can make up the difference.

“This would be life changing for some of our students,” Bernard said of education savings accounts.

David DeMatthews, an associate educational policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said there is not a clear divide on vouchers between the Catholic Church and other religions.

Some religious leaders see vouchers as antithetical to supporting public schools and equal access to education for all children. Others, amid dwindling enrollment, see it as an opportunity to allow more parents to choose schools that align with their family’s religion and values.

“For private religious schools that have a moral underpinning, it’s a really tenuous spot to support a bill that allows schools, for example, to discriminate against children with disabilities, especially with public money,” DeMatthews said. “There’s a moral aspect to this, especially when religious organizations claim to take the moral high ground.”

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In Vermont, where the state enshrines a centuries-old prohibition against using tax dollars for religious purposes, a that students in school choice districts may use their town’s tuition assistance at a local Catholic school.

The ruling comes on the heels of a pivotal Supreme Court decision last summer, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which stipulated in a 5-4 vote that public funding for school choice programs cannot exclude religious educational facilities simply on grounds that they are non-secular.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal group that argued the case on behalf of four Vermont high schoolers and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, is .

“Vermont’s program provides a public benefit to families to use at a school of their choice. The government cannot take a family’s benefit away from them just because it doesn’t like that the family chose to send their child to a religious school — that’s unconstitutional and discriminatory,” Paul Schmitt, legal counsel for the Alliance, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

“This decision makes clear that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause protects families in Vermont from religious discrimination the same as it does those in Montana.”

But legal scholars and education experts say that the case is not so simple — and is probably not over.

They draw a key distinction between a ban on public dollars going to religious schools simply because they are non-secular, which Espinoza clearly outlaws, versus enacting safeguards to ensure, “if you receive this money, you can’t use it to teach religion,” Derek Black, constitutional law professor at University of South Carolina, told ����Ӱ��.

Vermont’s town tuitioning program dates , making it the oldest school choice program in the country. However, up until 1991, participating private schools were considered by the state to be public schools with private boards, according to a 1989 Vermont Department of Education memo, subject to the same regulatory provisions as other town schools. Vermont’s program also differs from the funding mechanism in Montana, where private school tuition is subsidized through a tax credit scholarship, with donors receiving a tax break in exchange for their contribution versus public money flowing directly to private schools from the government.

Because Vermont has never had a rule to specify how taxpayer funds could be spent at private schools, Black says the court’s recent decision is unsurprising and likely to prompt further legislation.

“I don’t see why this decision suggests that Vermont needs to just wave a white flag and say, ‘OK, the coffers are open to the churches to come get what you want,’” he said. Instead, the state needs to “be nuanced and say, ‘OK, here’s how we’re going to restrict this use.’”

Peter Teachout, who works as a professor of constitutional law at Vermont Law School, agrees, arguing that there should be a process to certify that tax dollars are going to sectarian functions. “Private religious schools have lots of expenses that are unrelated to the propagation of religious feelings,” he pointed out in an interview.

The issue stems from voucher programs run by certain districts. Many school systems in the Green Mountain State are so small, former Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe told ����Ӱ��, that “it doesn’t make sense for … every single district in Vermont to have its own high school.” Instead, some districts allow funds to follow students to nearby public high schools of their choice, or to private schools as tuition subsidies.

Eli Hulse, who grew up in South Hero, Vermont and graduated from high school in 2015, attended one such district. His family homeschooled him up until the end of middle school. To ease the transition into high school, they selected a small private school and received tuition assistance from their town. It was an adjustment, Hulse said, to learn the formulaic writing expected in essays, pick up on the structure of classes and get used to taking exams, so the reduced class size helped.

“Teachers are able to give more dedicated attention to [a class] of 12 than one of a couple hundred,” he told ����Ӱ��.

But though his family did not choose a religious school, others in districts like South Hero do.

At Rice Memorial High School, the Burlington Catholic school attended by the students involved in the lawsuit, 17 families from “tuitioning” towns like Hulse’s already are enrolled, . They will now be eligible for funds from their towns as per the recent ruling. Tuition and fees are $12,425 and subsidies may attract new families to the school who previously had been unable to afford it, Lorenz hopes.

But Holcombe remains cautious. With the change comes new questions to be answered, she says. At Rice, for example, the task to “love learning, seek God and serve others” is “weaved into every aspect of life,” according to the school’s . How can tax money go toward the institution without supporting the teaching of religion, Holcombe wonders.

Further, what happens when those views come in conflict with the expectations of public-serving institutions, she asks. “If Vermont is subsidizing religious schools, will religion be used to justify discrimination?” she asked.

Holcombe points to Grace Christian School, a small, religious K-12 school in Bennington, Vermont, where the institution’s handbook .

In May, the school’s administrator told local news outlet VTDigger that Grace Christian “reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within the home or the activities of the student are counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle the school teaches.”

For students from tuitioning districts, “the government needs to define what the public education is that they’re purchasing when they pay a voucher,” argues Holcombe.

But regardless of any state-level changes that may arise in Vermont in response to the ruling, some observers predict that the case may ultimately land in the Supreme Court. Last October, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in a Maine case fell in the opposite direction of Vermont’s, .

“One of the issues in the Supreme Court taking up a case is, ‘Is there a circuit split?’” said University of South Carolina’s Derek Black.

If the Vermont case does reach the high court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, Holcombe thinks a larger strategy may be at work. She points to other cases litigated by the Alliance Defending Freedom, such as representing a Virginia teacher who , to argue that the Green Mountain State case may be part of a campaign to promote religious freedom at the expense of LGBTQ rights.

“Vermont is just one Lego piece in a larger building,” said Holcombe. “We were picked precisely because we have a weak statutory and regulatory set of constructs around the use of public dollars in private settings. We’re just a very convenient case test.”