Copyright 1994 News & Record (Greensboro, NC)  
News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
June 29, 1994, Wednesday, ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. A10, EDITORIAL

LENGTH: 603 words

HEADLINE: COURT SEES THROUGH CHURCH-STATE TANGLE

BODY:
A sweeping government entitlement challenged the traditional separation of public and religious institutions.

What might have seemed, at first blush, to be an open and shut violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution was in fact a subtle and fairly unique encounter of church and state. That's the lesson in the Supreme Court's decision Monday in the case of the Kiryas Joel School District.

In the end, by 6-3 decision, the court got it right. And in a majority opinion by Justice David Souter it did so without noticeably stretching or shrinking existing views of church-state separation. Yet a characteristically vigorous dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia underscores that these are rarely easy questions.

The Village of Kiryas Joel was carved out of Orange County, N.Y., for the benefit of a close-knit Orthodox Jewish sect called the Satmar Hasidim. Many of the sect's social customs and practices set its members sharply apart from the surrounding secular community. So radical are their differences, in fact, that the Satmar families educate virtually all their children in two Yiddish-language private schools, separated by sex, rather than send them to public school.

The private school gives boys "a thorough grounding in the Torah and limited exposure to secular subjects," while the girls' curriculum is "designed to prepare girls for their roles as wives and mothers." The children are not exposed to television, radio or English-language publications.

None of this would pose any constitutional problem but for state and federal laws that entitle handicapped children to "special education services even when enrolled in private schools." Parents of handicapped children sent them to the local Monroe-Woodbury public schools, but withdrew them citing "the panic, fear and trauma suffered in leaving their own community and being with people whose ways were so different."

Ultimately, the New York legislature tried to fulfill this mandate by designating Kiryas Joel a separate state school district. The district used its state funds to set up a special "secular" school for handicapped children; all others remained in private school. It was this all-Hasidic public school district that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional.

In Scalia's view (joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas), it was nothing of the kind. Scalia maneuvers around the First Amendment by saying the Satmar Jews are not defined by religion, but rather their "cultural distinctiveness." And of course there's nothing wrong with a cultural group having its own public school, in Scalia's words "specifically designed to provide a public secular education to handicapped students."

Of course, if it were truly a secular education the Satmars wanted, they'd have stayed with the public schools. What they did instead was try to have it both ways, the insularity and control of a religious school but with the blessings of state support.

There's nothing objectionable about private religious education, even education calculated not to prepare children for life in the secular world - if that's what parents want. There's nothing wrong with parents providing their own special education; mandates aside, the state has no monopoly on how to teach children with special needs.

In fact, the Supreme Court has given its blessings to an array of tax-paid benefits for students attending religious schools. But to sanction the "public" school operated by Kiryas Joel would be a celebration of form over substance and a serious erosion of the First Amendment.

LOAD-DATE: August 18, 1994