JTA — After Oklahoma approved a request by the Catholic Church to open a charter school in 2023, lawsuits quickly followed. Courts at both the state and federal levels ruled against the church, finding that a publicly funded school promoting religion would be unconstitutional.

Now, the US Supreme Court has taken up the case, signaling that the justices are willing to consider overturning a longstanding legal precedent protecting the separation of church and state. If the court allows St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to become the first government-funded religious school in the country, the consequences for religious education — including for Jewish schools — could be far-reaching.

The school’s backers argue that charter schools should be allowed to teach religion because they are not technically government institutions. They also contend that as long as a state permits charter schools — and nearly all states do  — excluding only religious ones violates the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

In St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, the fate of the school will be decided by a court whose conservative supermajority has steadily expanded religion’s role in public life. The court previously ruled in favor of a public high school football coach who wanted to pray with students on the field, and has allowed government voucher funding for religious schools.

Just before agreeing to hear the St. Isidore case, the court also accepted a case from Maryland concerning whether parents should be able to opt out of LGBTQ-themed lessons for their children on religious grounds.

Some Jewish supporters of St. Isidore believe the case could unlock public funding nationwide. It would lower costs for the parents, most of them Orthodox, who already send their children to private Jewish religious schools. For everyone else, it would make Jewish education a dramatically more accessible option. Less than 5% of non-Orthodox Jewish children attend Jewish day schools, according to estimates.

“I am very supportive of what the Catholic Church is doing here, and if they are successful, it has the potential to be a paradigm shift for American Jews and the opportunity for Jewish education in America,” said Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman who founded a network of Hebrew-language charter schools in Florida.

Deutsch originally envisioned his Ben Gamla charter school network as a way to combat the assimilation of American Jews. But his goal proved elusive, partly because church-state separation required the schools to remain fastidiously secular.

When Oklahoma approved St. Isidore, Deutsch traveled there,

© The Times of Israel