From the Alabama Constitution, 3.01:
(1) The framers of the United States Constitution, recognizing free exercise of religion as an unalienable right, secured its protection in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and the framers of the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, also recognizing this right, secured the protection of religious freedom in Article I, Section 3.
(2) Federal and state laws “neutral” toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise.
(3) Governments should not burden religious exercise without compelling justification.
(4) In Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), the United States Supreme Court virtually eliminated the requirement that the government justify burdens on religious exercise imposed by laws neutral toward religion.
(5) The compelling interest test as set forth in prior court rulings is a workable test for striking sensible balances between religious liberty and competing governmental interests in areas ranging from public education (pedagogical interests and religious rights, including recognizing regulations necessary to alleviate interference with the educational process versus rights of religious freedom) to national defense (conscription and conscientious objection, including the need to raise an army versus rights to object to individual participation), and other areas of important mutual concern.
(6) Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C., § 2000bb, to establish the compelling interest test set forth in prior federal court rulings, but in City of Boerne v. Flores, 117 S.Ct. 2157 (1997), the United States Supreme Court held the act unconstitutional stating that the right to regulate was retained by the states.
SECTION III. The purpose of the Alabama Religious Freedom Amendment is to guarantee that the freedom of religion is not burdened by state and local law; and to provide a claim or defense to persons whose religious freedom is burdened by government.
SECTION IV. As used in this amendment, the following words shall have the following meanings:
Demonstrates
(1) . Meets the burdens of going forward with the evidence and of persuasion.
Freedom of religion
(2) . The free exercise of religion under Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution of Alabama of 1901.
Government
(3) . Any branch, department, agency, instrumentality, and official (or other person acting under the color of law) of the State of Alabama, any political subdivision of a state, municipality, or other local government.
Rule
(4) . Any government statute, regulation, ordinance, administrative provision, ruling guideline, requirement, or any statement of law whatever.
SECTION V. (a) Government shall not burden a person’s freedom of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, except as provided in subsection (b).
(b) Government may burden a person’s freedom of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person:
(1) Is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) Is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
(c) A person whose religious freedom has been burdened in violation of this section may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial, administrative, or other proceeding and obtain appropriate relief against a government.
SECTION VI. (a) This amendment applies to all government rules and implementations thereof, whether statutory or otherwise, and whether adopted before or after the effective date of this amendment.
(b) Nothing in this amendment shall be construed to authorize any government to burden any religious belief.
(c) Nothing in this amendment shall be construed to affect, interpret, or in any way address those portions of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution permitting the free exercise of religion or prohibiting laws respecting the establishment of religion, or those provisions of Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, regarding the establishment of religion.
SECTION VII. (a) This amendment shall be liberally construed to effectuate its remedial and deterrent purposes.
(b) If any provision of this amendment or its application to any particular person or circumstance is held invalid, that provision or its application is severable and does not affect the validity of other provisions or applications of this amendment.
(Proposed by Act 98-409, ratified January 6, 1999, as Amendment 622. )
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From R. J. Rushdoony’s 1979 article “The Family,” republished in “Roots of Reconstruction, where Alabama is singled out for protecting the family:
“The triumph of Christianity was also the triumph over the ancient pagan equation of the state with all public law. It was the fundamental principle of the pagan state that it was the sole public sphere, and its right to govern all of life, including the private, was full and free. Plato’s Republic presupposes the right of the state to govern everything; this claim was not new to Plato; it was only his form of it that was different.
The early church resisted this claim at every turn. It rejected the claim of Caesar over the church, family, school, and more. The rapid change of Europe after the fall of Rome was due more to faith than to collapse. Europe moved from the centralization and the totalitarianism of Rome to a decentralized society. Flandrin has observed, “Christianity seems to have brought about the disappearance of the powers of the State over the child, and thereby increased the responsibilities of the parents as regards their maintenance and their education. These responsibilities were, at the same time, shared between the father and the mother” Jean-Louis Flandrin: Families in Former Times, Kinship, Household and Sexuality in Early Modern France, p. 176. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1979.) Step by step, society was altered to conform to the Biblical pattern, to become the Kingdom of God. This conformity was never more than dimly or at best moderately approximated at any point, but the benefits are with us still. In particular, the family became the central public sphere…
Various groups in the U.S. and Europe have been producing manifesto after manifesto, setting forth “Children’s Rights,” “Youth Rights,” “A Child’s Bill of Rights,” and like pretentious documents. These are presented as the last word in liberalism and radicalism. They are, in fact, reactionary, going back to the worst in paganism and in decaying cultures and civilizations. These set forth the supposed right of the child or children to sexual freedom, which often means the “right” to be exploited by others; the right to political power, i.e., voting, office-holding, etc.; the right to divorce themselves from their parents, and so on.
These plans must be taken seriously. With the International Year of the Child [1979], every state save one is issuing pronouncements which strike at the heart of the Biblical doctrine of the family. The one exception is Alabama, where a superior governor, who believes that Christian faith means profession with action, has turned to Christians for the state’s guidelines with respect to the child. What these revolutionary plans on the part of the enemies of the family call for is really the end of Biblical laws governing the family, the abolition of the family, and a “new man” created by humanism and in terms of humanism’s goals.”
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More details on Rushdoony and Alabama Governor Fob James can be found this article by Robert Daniel Rubin, “The Reagan-Era Right and the Fight for ‘Religious’ Equality in the Classroom”:
“The 1980s witnessed the resurgence of religious conservatism in politics and law. For decades, the Supreme Court had required a “wall of separation” to insulate students from organized prayer, Bible reading, and the promotion of religious values in the public-school classroom. Reagan administration officials and their supporters sought to crumble that wall by advocating the insertion of religion into textbooks and classroom exercises. In the 1982 case Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners, evangelical Christian lawyers attacked the “wall of separation” theory by arguing that the very secularism that purportedly ensured religious neutrality did itself constitute a religion—the “religion” of secular humanism. The judge hearing the case agreed, asserting that the First Amendment’s prohibition against an establishment of religion required the schools to treat theistic and secular “religions” equally. Key conservative officials applauded the ruling, which helped advance the New Right’s movement to Christianize America’s public schools.
In November 1982 a pair of evangelical lawyers, Tom Kotouc and Bob Sherling, questioned witnesses at an extraordinary trial. Jaffree v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County (554 F. Supp. 1104 [1983]) pitted a religious agnostic and father of three public school children against the school board of Mobile County, Alabama, which stood accused of violating the First Amendment’s ban on government endorsement of religion. At trial the Mobile school system defended its teachers’ practice of leading students in prayer during school hours. Kotouc and Sherling’s clients, a group of six hundred evangelicals from Alabama, entered the case as intervenors—concerned citizens who supported the schoolteachers’ and students’ rights to pray aloud, in organized fashion, at any time throughout the school day.
Yet, although the intervenors were designated as codefendants alongside the school board, their lawyers did not simply follow the school board’s lead. The intervenors at once complemented and complicated the school board’s position by charging that, if Mobile public schools had discriminated against anyone, it was the Christian majority of students who wished simply to practice their faith openly and sincerely. According to the intervenors, the curricula and textbooks used in the schools privileged the secularist minority. And that, they argued, violated the First Amendment by establishing a religion—the religion of secular humanism.
The intervenors in Jaffree v. Board were implementing a twenty-year-old argument that the textbooks and pedagogical methods employed by America’s public educators were propagating a liberal, secular-humanist “religion” alien to the majority of American citizens. Now, during the Reagan era, activists, politicians, and critics were refining this narrative and demanding that government and law reflect its premises. The New Right of the late 1970s and 1980s emphasized the virtues possessed by “ordinary” citizens—as opposed to the selfish, decadent cosmopolitanism of the “cultural elite”—and championed the right of elected representatives within individual states to regulate family and community life (Macedo 1987). The campaign to restrict the influence of secular humanism in the public schools encapsulated both the New Right’s political majoritarianism and its moral traditionalism. Critics of the textbooks, teaching methods, and anti-prayer policies of the nation’s public schools imagined large swaths of the United States populated by a conservative, “moral” majority. Throughout the South and West especially, where Biblical norms enjoyed their greatest influence, lay those states on which New Right curricular reformers pinned their hopes (Provenzo 1990; Detweiler 1999).
Alabama was one such state. Ishmael Jaffree, an African American lawyer and religious agnostic, had arrived in Alabama from Cleveland, Ohio, in 1976. Having long concluded that the devout Christianity of his childhood was false and destructive, Jaffree determined to raise his children as free thinkers who grounded their beliefs in reason and evidence rather than religious doctrine. He expressed surprise on learning that many Mobile public school teachers were leading their students—including three of his own children—in the daily recitation of grace. Jaffree’s surprise turned to outrage when his children’s teachers, their principals, and the superintendent of schools turned a deaf ear to his complaints. In June 1982 Jaffree filed suit in federal court against the Mobile school system (Newman 1985b; Irons 1990, 357–78).
Neither the teachers’ religious exercises nor their insensitivity to his complaints should have surprised Jaffree. Since World War II, Mobile had become the most religiously-conservative city in this religiously-conservative state. Few Mobilians saw anything wrong with classroom prayer or wished to see it purged (Flynt 1998, 566–67; 2004, 3, 7–8). After the lawsuit became publicized that summer, local residents let Jaffree know how staunchly they resented his efforts. His attempts to portray those efforts as a campaign in defense of minority civil rights failed to win him any support among black Mobilians, who responded as members, not of a racial minority, but of a God-fearing, Christian majority jealous of its right to exercise its faith freely (Williams 2002, 15, 20; Rieff 2001, 192–95). Nor was opposition to Jaffree limited to Mobile. Alabama governor Fob James, a conservative Democrat who strongly supported President Reagan and his traditional-values agenda, had always considered classroom prayer a legislative priority. The governor capitalized on Jaffree’s lawsuit by declaring his support for “those brave schoolteachers” and by winning overwhelming passage of a school-prayer bill, which featured a short prayer—written by the governor’s adult son—for teachers to chant with their students…
For its expert witness the board called constitutional scholar James McClellan, a writer and editor with close ties to the Reagan Justice Department and Senate conservatives. McClellan insisted that the school board could not possibly have violated the First Amendment’s ban on religious establishment because the First Amendment did not properly apply to the individual states. The Framers, including the authors of the first and fourteenth amendments, never intended to prohibit state governments from establishing religions, he informed the court. McClellan defended states’ rights against encroachment by the federal government, and he defended the lawmaking prerogatives of legislatures—the people’s elected representatives—against trespass by unelected federal judges. Like other key New Right constitutionalists, McClellan believed that judicial supremacy over legislatures tended to obstruct popular rule. The Court’s prohibition against religious expression in public schools “is undemocratic,” he told the court, because it allows “a small, select minority” to “impose their view on the people.” Democracy demands the right of the people to “encourage morality,” and the federal courts have no business standing in the way (Jaffree v. Board 1982, 525–30, 598–600)…
By tying conservative constitutionalism to conservative morality, the board enabled its codefendants, the intervenors, to expand the trial’s focus beyond the Constitution, and even beyond classroom prayer. The intervenors forged past where prayer supporters had tread in previous cases. They focused little of their argument on what the Constitution did or did not allow. The intervenors aimed to persuade the court that, inevitably, one or another fundamental worldview would shape all teaching materials and methods. Any given textbook or pedagogical theory, they said, would reflect one or another comprehensive morality—one way of parsing right from wrong, knowing what was true and what was false, deciding how to act and how not to act. The intervenors asserted that textbooks and curricula necessarily would be religious because particular religions directed all that was said and done in the classroom. And any worldview that ignored God and considered human beings the arbiters between right and wrong was, they claimed, as much a “religion” as one that acknowledged God as the source and purpose for all existence. The Christian conservatives who intervened in Jaffree v. Board defended the schoolteachers’ religious rights, not by denying the applicability to the states of the First Amendment, but by reinterpreting “religion.” To prohibit Christianity was to establish an alternative religion, they maintained. To silence children’s prayers was to advance the religion of secular humanism…
The portrayal of the secular classroom as a “religious” environment inhospitable to Christian values was not new. The Jaffree intervenors built on a profound and sweeping challenge to liberal curricular norms, one brewing since the early 1960s, the ostensible high point for the liberal, pluralist worldview in American culture and politics. During those years the Calvinist cultural critic Rousas John Rushdoony posited that the nation’s educational establishment had been captured by Enlightenment-based enemies of Christianity. Education, according to Rushdoony, necessarily advanced a single system of values—one or another “religion.” Either biblical Christianity or its secular antithesis would always be promoted in American schools. Rushdoony contended that, for much of the twentieth century, public schools had served as organs for the religion of secular humanism, a religion incompatible with biblical Christianity. He considered this situation intolerable, and he called on “true” Christians to begin changing society, to reassert the dominance of Christianity over the human-centered faith established by America’s educators (Rushdoony 1961, 1963).
Rushdoony’s influence was extraordinary. His writings gave rise to a Christian-Right critique of liberalism that depicted secular humanism as the ever-spreading stain needing to be removed from the fabric of American education, culture, and law (McGraw 1976; Duncan 1979; Schaeffer 1981; Hitchcock 1982; LaHaye 1983)…
Perhaps his most significant impact was on First Amendment scholar John Whitehead. With Rushdoony’s assistance, Whitehead created the Rutherford Institute, one of the nation’s foremost supporters of evangelical legal actions against the public schools (Clapp 1987; Provenzo 1990, 4–11; Clarkson 1998). Whitehead and other pioneers in Christian-conservative “cause lawyering” found in Rushdoony’s esoteric speculations the ideological basis for a new movement: the Christianization of the public schools (den Dulk 2005).
In his introduction to John Whitehead’s 1977 book The Separation Illusion, and in a subsequent essay, Rushdoony asserted that the authors of the First Amendment’s religion clauses had not intended to purge public institutions of Christianity, but only to protect Christianity from interference by the secular state…
Informed and inspired by his mentor’s essay, Whitehead drew upon its ideas in a highly influential law review article he published months later (Whitehead and Conlan 1978) and in a legal brief he submitted for the 1981 Widmar v. Vincent case, in which the Supreme Court began to revise its longstanding doctrine requiring the secularization of public education (454 U.S. 263). Through these and other avenues Rushdoony immeasurably influenced Christian-conservative education reform…
Alabama governor Fob James, along with his wife and son, subscribed wholeheartedly to that effort. From the beginning of his administration in 1980, the governor had sought to purge Alabama public schools of books that denigrated God, country, or traditional Christian values (Mobile Press 1981; Birmingham News 1981, 1982; Mobile Register 1982). Bobbie James, the governor’s wife, made it her personal priority to protect the place of prayer and “creation science” in the classroom (Mobile Press 1981; Montgomery Advertiser 1982c). Speaking to state legislators debating her husband’s school prayer bill in the summer of 1982, she reminded her audience of the “need to acknowledge God as sovereign over our public schools,” lest heathen forces continue to determine curricular policy (Montgomery Advertiser 1982b, 2). Zealotry was a James family affair. First son Fob III, who wrote the governor’s bill and its appended prayer, told the House and Senate committees that the school-prayer battle was an episode in a war between civil and religious authority. “Our Supreme Court has allowed a few atheists to deprive our people of the God who created them,” the governor’s son insisted. “Unless people have God above government, then government is God.” Preparing to pass his father’s bill, the Alabama legislature stood poised to “confront the Supreme Court of the United States” (Montgomery Advertiser 1982b, 2; Mobile Press 1982)…
The Jaffree intervenors argued that the real victims of religious discrimination were not Ishmael Jaffree’s three children but the countless boys and girls forced by Mobile public schools to endure and assimilate teachings from a religion that violated the core precepts of the “traditional” Biblical Christianity that their own families lived by. The Mobile schools—like all American public schools—had systematically promoted the secular-humanist worldview, an ideology so coherent and extensive so as to function as a religion. Indeed, the intervenors argued, for purposes of the First Amendment, secular humanism was a religion. That it embraced neither God nor theology was irrelevant. According to the intervenors, the effect of promoting secular humanism while silencing alternative worldviews was so pernicious that it rose to the level of religious establishment—a clear violation of the letter and spirit of the United States Constitution.
While the plaintiffs and the primary defendants called only a few witnesses, the intervenors summoned a parade of scholars, preachers, and teachers to testify to the secular-humanist indoctrination that took place in Mobile schools…
Employing a strategy popularized by the Gablers (Gabler and Gabler 1978), the intervenors called witness after witness to examine textbooks used by the schools and accused their authors of advancing anti-Christian beliefs, such as that human beings are morally autonomous, responsible for generating their own moral values. First to take the stand was R. J. Rushdoony, who reiterated his stock assertion that government-run schools indoctrinated children with secular-humanist propaganda. Mobile County, he warned, was proselytizing secular humanism with great effectiveness. Like the intervenors’ other expert witnesses, Rushdoony charged that the textbooks employed by Mobile schools advanced the humanistic worldview while they ignored or disparaged the Christian worldview. Two psychology books presented the humanistic notion that sex roles were culturally learned but not the Christian idea that sex roles were assigned by God, he complained; a science book explaining evolution made no reference to the corresponding Christian account of human origins; a short story’s author endorsed moral relativism by failing to reproach a character who had lied. Especially relevant to the intervenors’ case was Rushdoony’s objection to a social-studies book proclaiming that “morals are rules made by people.” That assertion, in his estimation, blatantly promoted the humanistic view that morality has no transcendental basis—a religious view in direct conflict with the Christian perspective (Jaffree v. Board 1982, 344–60). Rushdoony charged that the moral relativism saturating these schoolbooks derived from a pedagogical theory and method known as values clarification, which had gained widespread currency in the 1960s and 1970s through Values and Teaching, a well-known educator’s manual first published in 1966, and through the work of developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Central was the theory’s contention that schools must provide children with moral education by awakening children to their own personal values…
Judge Hand believed that federal judges should, whenever possible, avoid stifling “democratic” expressions of morality contained in state laws. He believed also that democracies needed to inculcate traditional morality into their youngest members (Hand 1976; Mobile Register 1986). Honoring what he took to be the Founding Fathers’ original intentions, Hand ruled, in Jaffree v. Board (554 F. Supp. 1104 [1983], 1118 n.24, 1127–28), that the First Amendment did not prohibit religious exercises in the classroom. Religious minorities had no choice but to endure the indignities and inconveniences that went along with marginality. He held that the Supreme Court, in its controversial decisions prescribing secularism in the classroom, had “amended the Constitution to the consternation of the republic and . . . den[ied] to the people their right to express themselves.” At James McClellan’s urging (Jaffree v. Board 1982, 556, 603), Hand disregarded Supreme Court precedent on school prayer, which he dismissed as “wrongly decided.” His brazen ruling would please and inspire conservatives from Senator Jesse Helms (Congressional Record 1983) to Attorney General Edwin Meese (Meese 1985, 5–6). Although it was overturned on appeal, the ruling echoed a call—sounded often on the New Right—to limit the power of federal courts over public-school policy…
Into his decision Hand wove an important subtext. If, in fact, the First Amendment did apply to the individual states and did require purging the classroom of religious exercises, Hand wrote, then all religious exercises must be eliminated. He promised that, in the event his ruling was overturned, he would revisit the case and address those issues “raised by the evidence produced by the intervenors dealing with other religious teachings now conducted in the public schools to which no attention has apparently been directed and to which objection has been lodged by the intervenors.” Although the school board’s constitutional arguments had primarily shaped Hand’s opinion, the intervenors had persuaded him that the religion of humanism exerted a dangerous impact on the schools. He complained about how case law had turned a blind eye to humanism’s inordinate influence. The intervenors, Hand determined, had established that the “curriculum in the public schools of Mobile County is rife with efforts at teaching or encouraging secular humanism—all without opposition from any other ethic—to such an extent that it becomes a brainwashing effort” (1129–30).
The Eleventh Circuit did reverse Hand’s ruling (Jaffree v. Wallace, 705 F.2d 1526 [1983]), and the Supreme Court upheld the reversal (Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 [1985]). When the case was remanded back to Hand, he realigned the parties, changing the intervenors into plaintiffs against the school board and state. Smith v. Board, the sequel to Jaffree, featured an even longer parade of conservatives charging the educational establishment with systematically inculcating the religion of secular humanism into the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Once again, Judge Hand ruled for the antihumanists. “For purposes of the first amendment,” Hand declared, “secular humanism is a religious belief system, entitled to the protections of, and subject to the prohibitions of, the religion clauses.” Recalling the arguments of Richard Baer, he complained not only that secular humanism enjoyed a religious monopoly in the classroom, but that its content was so dangerous so as to threaten children’s—and ultimately society’s—wellbeing. “Teaching that moral choices are purely personal and can only be based on some autonomous, as yet undiscovered and unfulfilled, inner self is,” he warned, “a sweeping fundamental belief that must not be promoted by the public schools” (Smith v. Board, 655 F. Supp. 939 [1987], 982, 987). Not surprisingly, Hand was again overturned (Smith v. Board, 827 F.2d 684 [1987]). But, once again, the judge sounded a ringing condemnation of liberal, secular education and the judicial principles that enforced it.
In Jaffree and its sequel, religious conservatives staged a drama long in the making. Informed by activism and ideas sketched out over several years, a group of Alabamians—including the governor, two lawyers, three schoolteachers, and a federal judge—performed one of the central actions in American politics of the 1980s—the attempt to Christianize the public schools. Events such as the Jaffree and Smith trials reveal the contours of the New Right’s campaign against secular education, a campaign that registered a significant historical shift. The impact of that shift only continues to grow with time’s passage.”
https://ch-ojs-tamu.tdl.org/ch/article/download/334/232
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A key portion of Alabama’s CHOOSE Act (Statute Section 16-6J-5 Requirements for Education Service Providers), our tax-credit school choice program:
(a) To be approved by the department, an education service provider must do all of the following:
(1) Submit to the department any information required by the department for implementation of the program, including its address, contact information, and a summary of each program or service it proposes to provide to participating students.
(2) Agree not to refund, rebate, or share any portion of program funds with a parent or student in any manner. Program funds may only be used for qualifying expenses.
(3) Agree to submit annual reports to the department concerning implementation of the program, including the number of students participating, services provided, and other similar information requested by the department.
(4) Agree not to discriminate based on grounds of race, color, or national origin in the provision of its services.
(5) Agree to document amounts received for all qualifying expenses in a manner prescribed by the department.
(6) Agree to comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g.
(7) Agree not to discriminate against participating students in setting tuition or fees.
(b) To be approved by the department, a participating school must do all of the following, in addition to satisfying the requirements of subsection (a):
(1) Agree to comply with all applicable health and safety laws or codes.
(2) Hold a valid occupancy permit if required by the municipality where the school is located.
(3) Agree to comply with the Alabama Child Protection Act of 1999, Chapter 22A.
(4) Provide financial statements that demonstrate, to the satisfaction of the department, the school’s ability to adequately provide for participating students’ continued receipt of educational services in the event the school suffers a financial failure. Alternatively, the school may file with the department a surety bond payable in an amount determined by the department to be equal to the aggregate amount of the program funds expected to be paid during the academic year from participating students enrolled at the participating school.
(5)a. Require all participating students receiving program funds to take a standardized assessment aligned to the curricula of the participating school, a nationally norm-referenced achievement assessment, or a nationally recognized aptitude assessment of the participating school’s choice. Students with disabilities for whom testing is not appropriate are exempt from this requirement.
b. Provide the parents of each participating student who is tested with a copy of the results of the tests on an annual basis, beginning with the first year of testing.
c. Provide the department with school-level test results for participating students, provided that no party shall disaggregate data to a level that could identify the academic level of individual students.
(6) Require participating students to make payments of tuition and other fees periodically on a schedule to be established by the department.
(7) Inform the department of a participating student’s graduation, withdrawal from the school, misuse of program funds, or other event affecting the student’s eligibility for the program.
(c) Fulfillment of the agreements made pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) is a requirement of continuing approval as an education service provider or participating school. Failure to fulfill the agreements made pursuant to subsections (a) or (b) shall constitute grounds for the department, in its discretion, to suspend or disqualify the education service provider or participating school from receiving program funds.
(d) A public school that becomes an education service provider under this chapter shall be given maximum flexibility to accommodate participating students and may create a process and establish requirements for accepting, selecting, or limiting the number of allowable participating students who are not assigned to that public school.
(e) No provision of this chapter shall be construed to require any public school, school system, or school district or any nonpublic school, school system, or school district to enroll any student.
(f) The Legislature finds and declares that education service providers, including participating schools, that accept program funds shall be given the maximum freedom possible to provide for the educational needs of students, consistent with state and federal law. To that end, unless clear from the text of this chapter, no provision of this chapter shall be construed to limit the independence or autonomy of any education service provider; to act as a restriction, direction, or mandate regarding instructional content or curriculum provided by any education service provider; to require an education service provider to alter its creed, practices, admissions policies, hiring policies, codes of conduct for employees or students, tuition, or fees; to expand the regulatory authority of the state, its officers, or any school district; or to otherwise deprive or diminish the protections for nonpublic schools, including nonpublic schools with a religious affiliation, available under any source of existing law, including Section 16-1-11.1 or Section 16-1-11.2, or Executive Order No. 733 issued by the Governor on January 20, 2023.
(g) A resident school district shall provide a participating school or other education service provider that has admitted an eligible student under the program with the complete copy of the student’s school records consistent with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g.
(Act 2024-21, §5.)
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