Amy and David Carson were high school sweethearts. They met at Bangor Christian Schools, a private religious K-12 school in Bangor, Maine, when they were in their early teens. Their siblings attended the school. Family members have taught there. “It’s quite an extended family community,” Amy Carson, 45, tells TIME.
Which was in part why Carson wanted her only child Olivia to attend Bangor Christian as well. “It’s very important, the value this school has,” she says. “They also have an extremely strong educational platform.”
The Carsons have lived in Glenburn, Maine, just outside Bangor, for 25 years. The roughly 4,500 person town sits in a region of rural Maine that doesn’t have a public high school. Instead, residents qualify for Maine’s tuition assistance program, meaning the state gives parents taxpayer money that can be spent to send their child to a different public school or an approved private school.
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But parents can’t use the program to pay for Bangor Christian. Maine says it will not fund the attendance of schools that provide religious education—a rule aimed at preventing public funds from being used for religious activity. So while Olivia, now 19, attended Bangor Christian from kindergarten through her high school graduation this May, this meant the Carsons paid entirely out of pocket for tuition, which costs $5,700 this school year for students in 6th through 12th grade.
On Dec. 8, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Maine’s policy violated the Carsons’ constitutional rights. In 2018, the family joined a lawsuit with Troy and Angela Nelson, another Maine family who wanted to use the tuition assistance program to send their son to a religious school but weren’t able to, alleging the state violated both the religion clauses and equal protection clauses of the Constitution by excluding schools that provide religious…
Source : time
