CA parents ask SCOTUS to stop state religious discrimination against homeschooling 

California parents are appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court on claims of religious discrimination after the state forbade homeschooling families from using religious curriculum in a state-funded charter school program.

“Parents should not be punished for choosing quality religious curriculum meeting the state’s standard that they teach to their own children in their own home just because it’s religious,” Executive General Counsel for First Liberty Institute Hiram Sasser said in a statement.

California charter schools, at-home education

Charter schools in California educate nearly 730,000 kids with some visiting physical school buildings, but many others completing work at home through independent study programs, First Liberty Counsel Kayla Toney told Heartlander News in an interview. Parents select the curriculum and provide the instruction while charter school staff review submitted work according to academic requirements.

Because the independent studies fall under charter-school jurisdiction, families receive state funds for educational expenses such as curriculum, materials and field trips, in alignment with California’s 1992 Charter Act. But two charter schools have continually rejected students’ submitted work due to either religious content or affiliation with religious publishers, Toney explained.

“California’s policy singles out parents who wish to give their children a faith-based education and excludes them from homeschooling benefits and support extended to other California families,” First Liberty’s petition states. “That’s an open-and-shut Free Exercise violation.”

The two charter schools, Blue Ridge Academy and Visions in Education, both denied parents funding and withheld academic credit from students whose work carried religious undertones or cited faith-based publications.

Blue Ridge rejected a student’s grammar sentence, “God sends the rain to help plants grow,” and claimed it “can’t accept any work sample with any religious wording on it,” according to the petition. The same school rejected a family’s use of an economics textbook that discussed St. Thomas Aquinas alongside John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, claiming that the textbook “contains a biblical worldview.”

Visions even rejected a child’s math work because it relied on a textbook from Bob Jones University, a Christian college in South Carolina, Toney said.

Three families joined a lawsuit to oppose the policies, but both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with the schools. The Ninth Circuit claimed parents instructing kids at home is equivalent to a “public school program,” but lawyers argue in the petition that this “def[ies] common sense” and violates the First Amendment by denying families universal public benefits based on religion.

“California likewise can’t redefine a parent’s home instruction as a public school and thereby dodge the Free Exercise Clause,” the petition states.

Supreme Court precedent favors the families

While the schools cite California’s constitution that forbids “sectarian instruction in common schools,” Toney said this particular amendment is “outdated.” Numerous states, including California, adopted these “Blaine amendments” during an “era of rampant anti-Catholic bigotry” in the 1870s, Toney explained. Additionally, the Supreme Court has ruled against such religious discrimination policies.

“The Supreme Court has held three times now that the Free Exercise Clause protects parents’ right to direct the religious upbringing of their children – that’s actually something that’s in the cases going back 100 years,” Toney said. “They’ve specifically held that when states decide to fund public benefit programs, whether it’s vouchers or online charter schools or private schools, really any sort of program, they can’t exclude religious parents, and they can’t exclude religious options. That’s very clear in the three cases.”

The Supreme Court knocked down Blaine Amendments in all three rulings across three separate states: Maine, Missouri and Montana, Toney explained.

“These three cases establish one simple rule. Once a State subsidizes education outside the walls of its public schools, it can’t disqualify an otherwise-eligible choice because the State deems it religious,” the petition states.

Additionally, SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled in favor of parental authority in recent years. Its 2025 Mahmoud v. Taylor decision, for example, declared parents have the right to “direct the religious upbringing” of their children including in “the public school classroom.” The petition references Mahmoud and the 2026 Mirabelli v. Bonta decision against California that said schools cannot hide the social transition of a child from his or her parents.

Toney said this homeschool case is “easier” than Mahmoud or Mirabelli because those cases protected parental rights in “traditional public schools,” adding “how much more should they be protected within a family’s own home?”

“The reason we drew on those cases is because we know that the court has really bolstered its jurisprudence in these areas and really drawn out the connection between free exercise rights and parental rights,” she said. “And, when they’re put together, that’s when they’re at their highest point.”

Despite the court precedent, California has continually ignored the Supreme Court’s rulings, to the point that Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the Ninth Circuit, which includes California and several West coast states, needs “a course correction.”

The Ninth Circuit is not unanimous, with five judges opposing the decision in California against religious homeschooling families, Toney said, adding that often court disagreement and numerous amicus briefs, “get the Supreme Court’s attention.” When First Liberty submitted the case to the Ninth Circuit, nine groups across the religious spectrum, submitted amicus briefs, she said. Amicus briefs for this petition submitted to the Supreme Court are due next month.

Ongoing harm to students, families

Meanwhile, as students return to school, California families desiring to use religious curriculum for at-home programs are forced to choose between faith, finances and education for their children, Toney said.

“It’s not just these three families that we represent. They know dozens of others who have had the same problem, and they’ve either just withdrawn from the program and had to go without the funds, or they’ve stayed in and had to choose books that aren’t religious, which is really tragic because that’s the whole point of their choice to homeschool,” she said. “It really does put families in a difficult position.”

One-third of American homeschooling families choose the at-home model based on religion, according to a national poll cited in the petition. At present, California’s policies force parents to choose between “funding and faith,” specifically between “exercising their religion and educating their children,” the petition argues.

“School choice obviously has been a huge movement in the last few years, and it’s really become more accessible in a lot of states,” Toney said. “But that’s why cases like this matter so much because it’s really important that, as school choice expands, the religious options are treated just as well as the secular options. Because really, for a lot of parents, their choices are motivated by their faith. And so, if you have school choice, but the religious folks are punished or excluded, that doesn’t follow the Constitution.”