The Supreme Court will hear a key school choice case challenging a state ban on using tax-credit scholarships at religious schools, justices announced Friday. The Montana Supreme Court ruled in December that the state’s tax-credit scholarship plan violated a provision in the state constitution barring public funding for religious education. Those provisions, called Blaine Amendments, are fixtures in many state constitutions and have often formed the basis of legal challenges to private school choice programs. The Montana case is one of several regarding state bans on public funding to religious institutions that have sprung up in the wake of the high court’s 2017 Trinity Lutheran decision . In that case, justices ruled that a church-affiliated preschool couldn’t be barred from a playground safety program simply because of its religious affiliation. Justices will hear the case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue , in their next term, which begins in October. The Supreme Court has long said the use of publicly-funded choice programs at religious schools is permissible under the U.S. Constitution, but lower courts have disagreed over whether states may ban it, Erica Smith, an attorney with the Institute for Justice representing the families challenging the ban, said in […]
