Maine School Choice
Bagley v. Raymond
IJ and Maine Parents Challenged Exclusion of Religious Options from School Choice Program (First Maine School Choice Challenge by IJ)
For well over a century, Maine parents in rural towns without public schools have enjoyed the right to select the school that best suits their children’s educational needs. The town then pays tuition to the school that the parents choose. Parents who live in “tuitioning towns” are free to pick any school for their children—public or private, in-state or out-of-state. For most of its existence, this statewide “tuitioning” system permitted the selection of religious schools. But in 1981, the state came to believe that the inclusion of religious options violated the federal Establishment Clause and excised them from the system.
Maine law singles out religious schools, and religious schools only, for discrimination, prohibiting towns from paying tuition to any school that is “sectarian.” In 1997 the Institute for Justice filed Bagley v. Town of Raymond, a lawsuit that challenges the exclusion of religious schools from Maine’s school choice program on behalf of five families in Maine tuitioning towns.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld the exclusion of religious schools in 1999, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision.