Free technology! Free state money! More enrollments! Public money for religious schools that state law forbids!
An offer too good to pass up.
A district with declining enrollment opened an online charter school (aka “cash cow”) offered free computers to students in a Catholic school a hundred miles away.
The arrangement allows students in Catholic schools to be enrolled in two schools at the same time. The academic record of online charter schools is dismal.
“That Lennox had created a virtual school was not so remarkable. Online public schools operate across California in almost every form imaginable. Some cater to home-schoolers; others focus on students who have fallen far behind. Many are charter schools that are supposed to be held accountable by the school boards that authorize them, but a handful are run by public school districts that answer mainly to themselves.
“The Lennox Virtual Academy operated in what legal experts have called a murky regulatory environment. Even so, it stood out both for enrolling students already attending school elsewhere and for its willingness, in partnering with Catholic schools, to test the limits of California’s particularly strict interpretation of the separation of church and state.
“The description of the pilot program alarmed Rivera, who is an attorney and could tell she was not being asked to sign an ordinary permission slip.
“It had red flags all over it,” she said of the paperwork, particularly one section that stated, “…all of our students in 5th-8th grade will need to be co-enrolled at both schools.”
“She grew even more concerned after she asked a St. Francis administrator how it could possibly be legal for a Catholic school to get such expensive technology for free from a public school district, and was told the school was taking advantage of a legal “loophole.” St. Francis officials declined to comment for this story, but the Diocese of Fresno and the Lennox School District defended the arrangement as legal.
“Rivera refused to sign the forms.
“There can’t be a loophole in the law that other private schools aren’t using,” she said. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
The Lennox School District’s providing online courses to church-run private schools is simply a variant of the “shared-time” plan pioneered in Betsy DeVos’s Grand Rapids, Michigan. That plan was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1985 in Grand Rapids School District v Ball, written by (Catholic) Justice William Brennan. The plan also appears to violate Article XIII, Section 24 and Article IX, Section 8 of the California state constitution. Finally, California voters decisively rejected public aid for private schools in 1993 by 70% to 30% and in 2000 by 71% to 29%. — Edd Doerr
So the students were simultaneously enrolled full time, at the same time, in two schools with conflicting curricula. Fraudulent. The State of California was paying to enroll students in a religious school, paying the religious school to ostensibly teach a nondenominational curriculum, but really teach religion. State paying Church. Google was collecting data on Chromebooks. What a sham. What a shame.