SCOTUS: Maine tuition reimbursement program must include religious schools

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : In order to satisfy the state constitution's requirement that every child be provided with an "opportunity to receive the benefits of a free public education," the state established a program to provide tuition assistance to parents living in towns lacking such schools, where the towns had not made their own arrangements for the children to attend public schools in a nearby town.
52% : The reference to the First Amendment is an allusion to the Establishment Clause.
48% : In one of a series of opinions favoring "religious freedom," the US Supreme Court ruled on June 21 in Carson v. Makin that a state program in Maine providing tuition assistance to parents living in towns without public secondary schools may not deny assistance to parents who chose to send their children to religious schools.
47% : "Nothing in our Free Exercise Clause cases compels Maine to provide tuition aid to private schools that will use the funds to provide a religious education," he wrote, but one must observe that he was a dissenter in the court's recent cases upon which Roberts relied in his opinion for the court, and so Breyer has been making this argument, unsuccessfully, all along.
46% : Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for six members of the court, found no real distinction between this case and a 2020 decision, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, in which the court held that the exclusion of religious schools from a state scholarship program violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
46% : The tuition can be used, without any geographical restrictions, to send the children to public or private schools inside or outside the state that meet accreditation standards.
46% : But in 1981 the legislature added a requirement that payment could only go to "a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
46% : Referring to the religious schools to which the plaintiffs were sending their children, he wrote: "Bangor Christian and Temple Academy, for example, have admissions policies that allow them to deny enrollment to students based on gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion, and both schools require their teachers to be Born Again Christians.
41% : In addition, while purporting to protect against discrimination of one kind, the court requires Maine to fund what many of its citizens believe to be discrimination of other kinds," referring to Breyer's statement summarizing Bangor Christian Schools' and Temple Academy's policies denying enrollment to students based on gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion.

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