A group of California parents is taking their fight for religious educational freedom to the highest court in the land, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a state policy that strips funding and academic credit from homeschool families who use materials with religious content.
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From The Christian Post:
“The charter schools overseeing petitioners’ independent-study programs rejected the use of works by William Penn and Jonathan Edwards because of their ‘religious content,’” the petition alleged.
Article 9, Section 8 of the California state constitution reads that “No public money shall ever be appropriated for the support of any sectarian [religious] or denominational school, or any school not under the exclusive control of the officers of the public schools; nor shall any sectarian or denominational doctrine be taught, or instruction thereon be permitted, directly or indirectly, in any of the common schools of this State.”
“Plaintiffs have alleged, and we take as true, that the defendant charter schools provide parents great flexibility to choose which pre-existing curricula to use to educate their children, or to create their own,” wrote Hurwitz. “But with that flexibility comes substantial legal constraints not applicable to private schools. … The extensive legal requirements applicable to the defendant charter schools’ independent study programs make the programs sufficiently public to defeat Plaintiffs’ free exercise claim.”
The case, John Woolard, et al. v. Tony Thurmond et al., stems from a lawsuit three families filed in October 2023 after their children’s charter schools rejected religious materials from their independent-study programs. The families, represented by First Liberty Institute, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and King & Spalding LLP, argued the schools even rejected a simple grammar exercise using the sentence “God sends the rain to help plants grow” because the school “can’t accept any work sample with any religious wording on it.” The families’ children participated in independent-study programs through Blue Ridge Academy and Visions in Education, two California charter schools bound by state rules requiring charter schools to remain “nonsectarian in its programs” under California Education Code § 47605(e)(1).
In September 2025, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against the parents, upholding the district court’s earlier decision. The panel leaned on the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin, which held that states are not required to fund religious education, even if they choose to provide public funding for education generally. The families argued their situation was different because these independent-study programs functioned more like private homeschooling than traditional public education. Ninth Circuit Judge Andrew Hurwitz rejected that distinction, ruling that the legal requirements placed on the charter schools made the programs “sufficiently public” to defeat the parents’ free exercise claim. After a request for a full Ninth Circuit rehearing failed, the families petitioned the Supreme Court last week.
First Liberty Institute Executive General Counsel Hiram Sasser argued the lower courts got it wrong from the start. “Parents should not be punished for choosing quality religious curriculum meeting the state’s standard that they teach to their own children in their own home just because it’s religious,” he said in a statement. The Supreme Court will resume closed-door conferences beginning Sept. 28, with its new term opening Oct. 5, meaning a decision on whether the justices will take up the case could come as early as this fall.
This case cuts to the heart of a question many Christian parents have wrestled with for years: does choosing to educate your own children according to your faith make you a second-class citizen in the eyes of the state? These families aren’t asking California to fund a religious school. They’re asking not to be penalized for teaching their own children at their own kitchen tables using materials that happen to reflect a biblical worldview. If the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning stands, families across the country teaching their children timeless truths, that God is the author of life, that His Word is trustworthy, that history was shaped by men and women of faith, could find themselves locked out of educational opportunities available to every other family. Scripture calls parents to raise their children “in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4), and no government policy should stand in the way of that God-given responsibility.
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(Excerpt from The Christian Post. Photo Credit: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images).
