TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (ABP) — The Florida Supreme Court overturned that state's school-voucher program Jan. 5, saying it violates the Florida Constitution. But the court's decision did not address whether state money for parochial schools violates Florida's religious-freedom laws.
Lower state courts had ruled against the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program as well, citing a provision of the Florida Constitution that says no state money “shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid … of any sectarian institution.”
But the high court's decision turned on a different provision of the state's charter that requires “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.”
The voucher program violates that constitutional requirement, a 5-2 majority of the court said, because it “diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children.”
Chief Justice Barbara Pariente, who wrote for the majority, said the voucher program also was unconstitutional because it provides public-education funding to “private schools that are not 'uniform' when compared with each other or the public system.”
But Justice Richard Bell, in a dissenting opinion, said the program does not prevent the legislature from fulfilling its duty to provide for a free public-education system.
“Opportunity scholarships are available on a very limited basis — only to students whose public school has repeatedly failed to meet the legislature's minimum standard for a 'high-quality education,'” Bell noted. “While the scholarships are taken from public moneys allocated to public education, the amount of money removed from the public schools is not a dollar-for-dollar reduction because the opportunity scholarships are capped at the non-public school's tuition. On average, this is apparently less than the per-pupil allocation to public schools.”
The decision in Bush v. Holmes was the culmination of a battle that began seven years ago, shortly after Gov. Jeb Bush (R) came into office and promised to reform the state's education system. Legislators passed the voucher program as the centerpiece of Bush's education agenda.
In 2002, the federal Supreme Court ruled that voucher programs that include religious schools do not violate the First Amendment's ban on government support for religion as long as parents' decisions to spend their children's scholarship money at parochial schools are made through genuine private choice.
But in a subsequent decision, that court made clear that states may place a higher restriction on government funding for religious institutions than the federal government does.
In 1999, longtime Pensacola teacher Ruth Holmes sued to have the program stopped, citing both the uniformity and religious-funding aspects of the Florida Constitution. Holmes also was a former president of the state teachers' union.
Several civil-rights and religious-freedom groups signed on in support of both sides in the case, citing their competing views of government funding for religious schools.
The court, however, said they did not need to make a determination on the case's church-state merits because the uniformity objection to the program was sufficient to end the scholarships.
Voucher opponents hailed the ruling, while Bush and other voucher proponents said they would pursue new ways to enact vouchers — including amending the Florida Constitution.
Bush released a statement calling the public-school system a “monopoly” and said the approximately 700 voucher students and their families affected by the decision would suffer because of it.
''It is a sad day for those families and a sad day for accountability in our state,'' Bush said.
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