California has consented to permit a group of Orthodox Jewish parents to utilize public funds for enrolling their children in religious-based special education programs.
An agreement was reached Monday in the case of Loffman et al. v. California Department of Education et al., which questioned whether state officials could enforce a provision in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that barred the use of state funds at religious schools.
In a joint motion for the entry of a consent judgment and a permanent injunction filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, both parties agreed to "judgment in Plaintiffs' favor and a permanent injunction … to resolve all claims raised by Plaintiffs against Defendants in this case."
The joint motion stated, “Defendants agree that they shall not appeal from any ruling that adopts this Consent Judgment, which, along with the Settlement Agreement, represents the full scope of the agreement between the Parties. Defendants further agree that the relief granted herein is fair and equitable,” and added, “The Parties agree that Plaintiffs are the prevailing parties and therefore are entitled to reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs, the amount of which is resolved by the Parties’ separate Settlement Agreement.”
The lawsuit was initially filed in March 2023 by Jewish parents, naming as defendants the California Department of Education, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Anthony Aguilar, chief of special education, equity, and access.
The plaintiffs contended that the defendants violated the ‘First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause’ and the ‘14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause’ by preventing parents from using public funds for sending their children with special needs to Orthodox Jewish schools. The California Education Code mandated that any schools receiving federal IDEA funding be “nonsectarian.”
In August 2023, U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, ruled against the parents. She wrote that the complaint “mischaracterizes the nature of the available benefits” and that “California’s nonsectarian requirement applies to schools, not IDEA-eligible children and their parents.”
However, in October last year, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, with Circuit Judge Kim Wardlaw, a President Bill Clinton appointee, writing that the state “failed to prove that the “nonsectarian requirement is narrowly tailored to serve” government neutrality.
