The judge who ordered a halt to a Douglas County School District voucher program five years ago handed down a similar order Wednesday, enjoining a version of the program that had been reconfigured to exclude religious schools.
Denver District Judge Michael Martinez ruled that Douglas County’s School Choice Grant Program, created by the district in the spring, is not substantially different from its predecessor program, the Choice Scholarship Program. That program was struck down by the Colorado Supreme Court last year as unconstitutional due to the fact that it permitted public money to be used to educate students in religious schools.
Wednesday’s ruling comes just a couple of weeks before the Aug. 18 start to the school year and as the district is on the verge of finalizing contracts with four private schools that wanted to participate in the voucher program.
But Tom McMillen, director of Student and Parent Choice for the Douglas County School District, said only five eligible students had applied to the School Choice Grant Program. While he said they and their families would be disappointed by the court’s decision, there is “less to dismantle” than had the program had dozens of schools and hundreds of students signed up and ready to go.
The program initially aimed to serve 500 students, according to the district’s website. The Douglas County School District has 67,000 students — the third largest enrollment in Colorado.
The district’s voucher program has been mired in various legal challenges since it was first introduced in 2011. After the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling in 2015 that the state constitution banned the use of public funds for sectarian instruction, the district in March introduced a new version of the program that would allow taxpayer money to help cover a private school education, as long as those schools didn’t have a religious affiliation.
But Martinez ruled that the district itself had marketed the new voucher program “as a continuation” of the rejected program, and “thus, it appears to this court that there is no fundamental difference between the two programs that would warrant exemption under this court’s original injunction.”
The challenge to the School Choice Grant Program was brought in May by the Taxpayers for Public Education, which argued that no public money should be used to pay for private schooling of any kind.
“This is a victory for public schools in Douglas County and across Colorado,” group president Cindy Barnard said Wednesday. “The DCSD voucher program hurts public school children because every dollar used in the voucher program is a dollar taken away from public schools.”
