Under Oklahoma law, religious institutions and private sectarian schools are not supposed to participate in the state’s charter school programs. As 2022 came to a close, however, Oklahoma’s outgoing Republican attorney general, John O’Connor, and state Solicitor General Zach West said the law should not be enforced.
It’s against this backdrop that the Associated Press reported this week:
A state school board in Oklahoma voted Monday to approve what would be the first publicly funded religious school in the nation. … The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve the application by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma to establish the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School.
In the interest of clarity, it’s worth noting that Roman Catholic groups have, for many years, received public funds to provide secular social services. It’s not unusual, for example, for a city to contract with a local Catholic Church to host soup kitchens, for example.
This is something altogether different. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma said in the “vision and purpose of the organization” section of its charter school application that the Catholic school “participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church and is the privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out.”
The state’s current Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, warned that using public funds to finance religious education would be “contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers.” The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the application anyway.
The news comes two weeks after the Associated Press published a related report about Oklahomans’ neighbors in Texas.
Texas would allow public schools to use campus safety money to hire chaplains to counsel students under a bill approved this week by state lawmakers and sent to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. The measure approved on [May 24], the one-year anniversary of the school…
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