Homeschooling family says California made 'burdensome' requirements on faith to participate in charter school
California homeschooling parents say the state violated the U.S. Constitution by putting "burdensome" requirements on their family to hide their faith in a public charter school program.
John and Breanna Woolard joined three other homeschooling parents who filed a lawsuit against California schools after their children's public charter schools wouldn't approve the faith-based educational resources they chose through their "independent study" option.
"It's very much like a traditional homeschooling program except with the state funding. But the problem is that many of these charter schools are saying that the parents can select any curriculum they want for their families so long as it's not religious," First Liberty Counsel Jonathan Butterfield told Fox News Digital.
First Liberty, which is representing the Woolard family in their lawsuit, said Blue Ridge Academy, a tuition-free charter school in Southern California, is guilty of religious discrimination. The suit filed on Oct. 11 claims the school restricted the Woolards from purchasing religious curriculum for their three school-age children, even if it met state education requirements, and refused to accept student work samples that derived from faith-based material.
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John Woolard told Fox News Digital that they chose to enroll in the charter school program, so their children could have more opportunities such as music lessons and educational field trips while at the same time, they were able to guide their education through their Christian faith.
"Education is extremely important in our house as well as the integration of our faith in everything that we do," Woolard remarked. "So we are participating in the charter school as an opportunity to perfectly blend the two of those together where we could give our kids the kind of education that we wanted, minus some of the things that we saw as problematic in public school education, all at the same time, training our kids in our faith and our values."
But Woolard said they encountered problems integrating their faith from the beginning through the charter school program.
"When we wanted to purchase curriculum that made any sort of reference to religious anything, there was an immediate red flag thrown up," he explained.
"When my daughter would try to turn in a work sample, we were told that our work samples could not make mention of the faith. We couldn't have anything on there that demonstrated our religious orientation," he said.
While they could use material that came from a faith-based curriculum, he said, they were required to remove any indication it actually came from a religious publisher.
Woolard said their family was not trying to buy explicitly religious texts, such as Bibles or Bible studies through the program, but books that had "at least some sort of religious affiliation."
"So really it was like anything that would indicate that we were a religious family or that we were interested in integrating our faith into education — all of those things had to be stripped away in order for us to submit work samples or to use curriculum with Blue Ridge," Woolard said. "These kinds of requirements were from the very beginning, and they were very burdensome to our family."
Fox News Digital reviewed documents in the lawsuit that were purportedly rejected by the school. One document, which appears to come from a math textbook, does not have any mentions of religion, and asks the student to solve multiplication and division problems. Another document in the suit is a Language Arts worksheet, which asks students to identify sentences and fragments. While the questions do not mention religion, there is a small drawing with a Bible verse on the page.
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Blue Ridge Academy said that work samples must be "non-sectarian/non-religious" to be accepted, in their parent-student handbook, according to the suit.
The Woolard's attorney said this requirement derives from a Blaine Amendment in California's state constitution.
However, he said the Supreme Court had already deemed state laws which exclude religious teaching in publicly funded education to be unconstitutional, most recently in Carson v. Makin.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled the state of Maine could not exclude private schools with religious teaching from receiving funds from their tuition assistance program.
"The Supreme Court said, no, you can't offer a benefit and open it up to everybody except for those who want to use it for religious education. That's religious discrimination, and the Constitution prohibits that," Butterfield said.
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"That's the exact same thing California is doing here. California is saying, here's this educational benefit. It's available to everybody that enrolls in all these charter schools, and you can use it for anything except for religious curriculum," he added.
Blue Ridge Academy didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.
Fox News' Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.
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