Legislators will consider a request to repeal the 1981 law banning use of public funds for religious schools.
Jill Guay will ask state lawmakers today to turn back the clock and allow parents like her to use taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to send their children to religious schools.

Maine is one of just a handful of states with a school voucher program. It allows parents in towns without their own schools to use up to about $6,000 in public funds to send their children to any public school or a non-religious private school. Years ago, parents were able to use the money to send their children to religious schools, but a 1981 law barred that practice. Now a bill before the Legislature calls for repealing the ban. The bill, the subject of a public hearing today before Legislature's Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, follows a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer that found it is not unconstitutional to use tuition vouchers at religious schools.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Kevin Glynn, R-South Portland, says its purpose is to "end discrimination against religious schools."

Guay, a resident of Minot, which doesn't have its own high school, plans to speak in favor of the bill.

"Basically what we're doing," she said, "is trying to overturn the law that was put in place in 1981 so we can use the tuition . . . to send our daughter to the school of our choice, which happens to be religious."

Guay and her husband used town tuition money last year to send their daughter Ashley, 15, to Poland Regional High School. But they switched her this year to St. Dominic Regional High School, a Roman Catholic institution, for academic and religious reasons. Now, they pay the tuition of almost $5,000 per year out of their own pockets.

The bill that Glynn has submitted is just one way the 1981 law is under challenge.

Guay and seven other families also filed suits last fall against the state over the ban. The lawsuits - one filed in state court by the Guays and five other families from Minot, Durham and Raymond, and one filed in federal court by two families from Minot - charge that the prohibition amounts to religious discrimination.

The families in the lawsuits are being represented for free by two conservative advocacy groups, the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., and the American Center for Law and Justice, based in Virginia Beach, Va.

Clark Neily, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is representing the families who filed the lawsuit in Cumberland County Superior Court, also will speak at today's public hearing.

Neily said he will argue that the law should be overturned not only because it's unfair but because repealing it would end the need for the lawsuits, which he predicts Maine will lose.

"I think it's a waste of taxpayer money," he said. "I hope the Legislature senses that."

The lawsuits were filed after a bitterly divided Supreme Court ruled for the first time in June that the government can give financial aid to parents to send their children to religious schools.

Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe said the pivotal decision didn't apply to Maine. Rowe said while the high court said states could use vouchers for religious schools, it didn't require them to do so.

But Neily argues that Maine now can't exclude religious schools without a good reason. "Any time government makes a distinction among viewpoints or races and freedom of expression, it has to have what the court calls a compelling interest in making that distinction," he said.

It's not clear how lawmakers will react to the bill. The committee will vote on the matter at a work session to be held at a later date.

Rep. Glenn Cummings, D-Portland, and House chairman of the Education Committee, said legislators will want to understand the reasoning for the 1981 change in the law. For himself, he said he would be cautious about removing "the wall between public and private monies." He said that "any infringement on that line has to be considered very carefully."

Sen. Neria Douglass, D-Auburn, is the Senate chairwoman of the committee. She said she plans to keep an open mind but wants to know what precedents would be set by using the vouchers at religious schools.

About 11,000 Maine students receive tuition money from their hometowns to attend other schools, but most don't have a choice of schools because their districts contract to send them to a specific school.