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Voucher battle heads to court
The Florida Supreme Court will hear Bush vs. Holmes this week, with many educational and religious issues in the balance.
By RON MATUS, Times Staff Writer
Published June 6, 2005
Call it a culture war showdown.
Competing factions will square off over race, religion and education Tuesday when they argue the school voucher case before the Florida Supreme Court.
At direct issue in Bush vs. Holmes is Florida's Opportunity Scholarships program, created by Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999 to allow children in failing public schools to attend private schools at state expense. The court's decision, which could come before school starts in August, will immediately affect about 700 children using the vouchers.
But much more is hanging in the balance, including thorny questions about how to improve public schools and where to draw the line between church and state.
Both sides are predicting doomsday if they lose.
If vouchers go down, supporters say a host of other state programs with links to religious organizations could fall, including the wildly popular Bright Futures scholarships for college students and the state's fledgling prekindergarten program.
Meanwhile, voucher opponents say court approval for Opportunity Scholarships would open the door to "universal vouchers" - vouchers for anybody and everybody - leading to the demise of public schools.
In one corner is Bush, a Republican who has never hesitated to push controversial school initiatives. His supporters include a long list of conservative think tanks and legal foundations.
In the other corner: the National Education Association, which is the nation's largest teachers union and a pillar of the Democratic Party. It is backed by a who's who of liberal groups, including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Jewish Congress.
Legal experts say the fight is impossible to handicap. Florida's high court rarely deals with church-state issues, so there are few rulings to analyze for patterns. And two of the seven justices are recent appointees.
The court's track record is "so skimpy that anything I or anyone else says is almost purely speculative," says Steve Gey, a professor of constitutional law at Florida State University.
Bush vs. Holmes isn't likely to plow new legal ground nationally. The U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned vouchers in 2002. And vouchers remain an issue in Florida only because the state Constitution has different - and some say more restrictive - language than the U.S. Constitution.
But the fight in Florida still has enormous symbolic value.
The Florida program is the first and only statewide voucher program in the nation - the "crown jewel of school choice programs," says Clinton Bolick, head of the Alliance for School Choice in Phoenix.
To have it struck down, he says, "would be a very stinging defeat."
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