Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approves contract for nation’s first religious public charter school

Clearly unconstitutional. But we’ve been spending millions of tax dollars annually defending unconstitutional acts and biased desires of our politicians.
 
Chairman of Oklahoma virtual charter school says he won't sign off on contract with St. Isidore

Robert Franklin said he voted "no" and refused to sign off on the contract because he felt doing so would violate the state's constitution. Franklin leaned on an opinion written by Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who argued that funding a Catholic charter school violates the separation of church and state.

"I do know this, from a personal standpoint, I know that I can’t lay my head down at night and look back on this three years from now and say, 'Man, you know it was wrong, you shouldn’t have done it, you were told it was wrong, it didn’t align with the state’s constitution, you signed an oath to do it, but you signed it anyway," Franklin said.

The Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which supports the charter school, said the argument falls flat when the state is already allowing school choice tax credits to go toward private religious schools. For Franklin, his position remains the same: public schools and religion shouldn't be mixed.

 
Back
Top