The lawsuit – filed in August in DeKalb County Superior Court – alleges that the families are being denied the chance to receive $6,500 vouchers for their children to attend the school of their choice because the program requires applicant families’ children to be enrolled in a public school for two consecutive years. The program also requires students to be enrolled in a failing public school. The three families are educating their children in religious settings, and forcing them to go to a failing public school to qualify for the $6,500 voucher harms their religious liberty, the lawsuit states.
“Georgia could have designed an economical education system that does not burden its citizens’ constitutional rights,” states the lawsuit, filed by Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm representing the families. “Instead, it has engineered a coercive system in which parents either receive public benefits without religious liberty, or religious liberty without public benefits.”
The lawsuit says such coercive restrictions violate the First Amendment.
While families sought a temporary restraining order asking the court to declare the program requirements unlawful before the August 31 deadline for Promise Scholarships, court records do not indicate any action since the lawsuit was filed.
The lawsuit comes at a time when the legality of scholarship programs such as the Georgia Promise are being challenged in court if certain segments of the population are shut out of the opportunity because they don’t come from the program’s targeted demographic. Conservative activists who are bringing the lawsuits say they’re consistent with the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the use of race in college admissions.
For instance, in Wisconsin, the state’s supreme court recently struck down the Minority Undergraduate Retention grant as unconstitutional because the $2,500 grants were reserved for low-income Black, Native American, Hispanic, or certain Southeast Asian students who arrived in the U.S. after December 31, 1975. Although the idea behind the program was to help students from demographics with lower-than-average completion rates, the Wisconsin high court said the state could have offered the program in a race-neutral way.
The Georgia Promise Scholarship Program lawsuit is different – even among lawsuits that allege religious discrimination – because it argues students and families are being shut out of an educational program that makes eligibility contingent on sending their children to public schools, which they say is a violation of their faith. That’s different from the various lawsuits that have successfully argued that publicly funded scholarship programs are discriminatory because they prohibit religious schools from participating. Thus, the outcome of the Georgia Promise lawsuit could serve as a bellwether for the expansion of litigation that challenges scholarship eligibility criteria that precludes certain groups from participating.
