OKLAHOMA CITY — The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board on Monday voted 3-2, including the deciding “yes” vote by a new member who was installed on Friday, to approve state sanctioning and taxpayer funding for a Catholic school.
If or when St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School opens, it will be the nation’s first religious charter school, but taxpayer challenges have been promised.
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The application for charter school funding for a school with religious teachings, policies and hiring practices is viewed by Oklahoma Catholic church leaders and attorneys with the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative Clinic who helped them as a test case to challenge separation of church and state laws across the nation.
St. Isidore has been proposed to provide Catholic school education access to students in areas currently without Catholic schools and to expand online course offerings to students in existing Catholic schools across Oklahoma.
In April, the board unanimously denied the sponsorship application for St. Isidore. But Catholic leaders took advantage of the opportunity afforded them under state law to take 30 days to revise and resubmit their charter school sponsorship application.
Long-serving member Barry Beauchamp, a retired school superintendent from Lawton who had been allowed to continue serving on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board after his term expired some months ago, was replaced abruptly on Friday with Oklahoma City businessman Brian Bobek by Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall.
At the start of Monday’s special meeting, Board Chairman Robert Franklin asked Bobek to abstain from voting Monday to “avoid the appearance of political manipulation.”
But when it came time to vote, Bobek said it was his duty as a board member to vote, and reading from a written statement, said he believed it would violate the U.S. Constitution to bar a religious entity from state sponsorship on the basis of religion.
He voted “yes” alongside Nellie Sanders of Kingfisher, appointed earlier this year by Oklahoma Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat; and Scott Strawn, appointed recently by Gov. Kevin Stitt.
Voting no were Bill Pearson of Oologah, who also was recently appointed by McCall; and the only long-serving board member, Franklin of Tulsa.
Both cited the Oklahoma Constitution’s provision for a system of free public schools and a requirement in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act that charter schools be nonsectarian.
At the conclusion of Monday’s meeting, Franklin announced that he intends to resign from the board.
Bobek previously served nearly four years on the State Board of Education and the State Board of Career and Technology Education through appointments by Stitt.
At the conclusion of Monday’s meeting, Bobek made a beeline across the room to one of the architects of the application, Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma.
Asked whether he wrote the lengthy statement with numerous legal citations he read during the meeting, Bobek replied to the Tulsa World: “No comment.”
Stitt has been vocal in his support for the St. Isidore application.
In early December, Stitt’s appointee to the position of Oklahoma Attorney General, John O’Connor, issued an advisory legal opinion that the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board should not abide by the state’s ban on publicly funded charter schools being operated by sectarian and religious organizations because the ban could be in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
That piece of advice served as the green light to Oklahoma Catholic leaders to submit the St. Isidore application in January.
But almost immediately upon taking office, Oklahoma’s newly elected Attorney General Gentner Drummond withdrew O’Connor’s December legal opinion and cautioned the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board against sponsoring St. Isidore.
Drummond said O’Connor’s advice was based on legal precedent involving private schools, not public schools, and said sponsoring a religious charter school run by one denomination would “create a slippery slope” to use “religious liberty” to justify state-funded religion.
Chairman Franklin on Monday directed the board’s attention to Senate Bill 516, which was just passed by the Oklahoma State Legislature and signed into law Monday by Stitt.
In addition to abolishing the current board come 2024 and creating a new governing board with expanded authority over all charter schools, Franklin said it seemed noteworthy that SB 516 “maintained the same key provision” from the state’s long standing Charter Schools Act.
Specifically, SB 516 states: “A charter school shall be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations. A sponsor may not authorize a charter school or program that is affiliated with a nonpublic sectarian school or religious institution.”
Assistant Attorney General Niki Batt, one of the board’s legal advisors, told the board Monday before its vote that the “heart of the matter is whether or not these are public or private schools, and that will ultimately have to be decided by the court.”
“It’s important for this body to remember you are an executive branch agency, so it’s not (your) job to interpret the law. It’s your job to enforce the law as it already exists,” she said, noting that Oklahoma law clearly defines charter schools as public schools.
She also told the board that its standard sponsorship contract, which it has used without any customization for all of its six currently sponsored schools, would have to be amended for St. Isidore, if approved, because it includes assurances that charter school operations will be nonsectarian.
When Franklin asked about the implications of amending the standard contract for the board’s other sponsored schools, Batt responded that enforcement of that standard contract on other charter schools could be viewed as “arbitrary and capricious” if they aren’t also afforded customized contract terms.
In public comments to the board before the vote, Erika Wright, president of the 12,000-member Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, criticized the Friday board member replacement as 11th-hour vote stacking that “removes trust” from the process.
“I oppose state funds being used for a religious school,” she said. “Using public funds to support religious charter schools diverts crucial funds from public education. Everyday Oklahomans are not clamoring for this. This is the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.”
Clark Frailey, an Edmond pastor who founded Pastors for Oklahoma Kids, a nonprofit, nondenominational group of pastors from across Oklahoma that advocates for public school policy, told the board he was taught in the two private, religious schools he attended — Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth — that “the church should not resort to the civil power to do its work. … If you choose to approve this, you will be violating this thought.”
Longtime Tulsa-based education attorney Doug Mann told the board that state sponsorship and funding for a religious school would cause government intrusion into religion.
Representing the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee, a public school advocacy group, Mann warned that there would be “dire consequences to this board if it goes forward” in the form of a taxpayer lawsuit “in which the taxpayers will seek three times the amount of money that is ultimately paid to this school.”
“You cannot leave here today with any doubt in your mind as to what each of you are putting on the line if you pursue this unlawful course of action,” he said.
Oklahoma City attorney A.J. Ferate, who recently served for a year as chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, spoke on behalf of First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit Christian conservative legal organization based in Plano, Texas, that litigates First Amendment cases. He told the board members that Mann “tried to scare you,” and he offered to personally represent them if they are sued.
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Tulsa World Staff Writer Andrea Eger talks with Editor Jason Collington about the efforts by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa to get state sponsorship and taxpayer funding for what would be the first religious charter school in the country. The pitch is before the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board.
