State’s supreme court urged to tell school to stop discriminating against Christians

The Ohio Supreme Court is being urged to tell a school district to stop discriminating against Christian students.

It is the American Center for Law and Justice that reports it has filed a major brief in the lawsuit it recently brought against the Columbus City Board of Education.

The district is attacking the rights of parents to choose their children’s education by refusing to transport children to private schools, including many Christian schools.

That appears to be in violation of a state law that expressly requires the district to provide such transportation.

The legal team’s report said, “Ohio law requires school districts to provide transportation to all students in their jurisdiction, regardless of what school they attend. When a school district decides that it cannot provide transportation, Ohio law mandates that the school board provide transportation at least as long as a parent is appealing their decision.”

The ACLJ said, “The Columbus School Board has violated that obligation on a large scale, canceling transportation for over 1,000 students. The law requires that a decision be made at least a month before school starts and proper notice given; but for many students and their families, including our client, they did not find out about the decision to stop providing busing until after the school year began. Imagine the first day of school and your kids are waiting for the bus, and it never comes. Most importantly, the school board has refused to provide any transportation to the families who are appealing its decision despite its mandatory obligation to do so.”

The ACLJ said, “This violation of the law has no excuse.”

The report said the school wants the case dismissed, because the law “imposes a penalty on school districts” when they refuse to provide the required transportation, and the school claims “this penalty is sufficient to address the harms.”

Explained the ACLJ, “In other words, the school district doesn’t argue that it didn’t violate the law, but that the courts should not address how it violated the law. This penalty is important, but it is not enough to actually fix the injury done here. Every day students and their families are being harmed by the school board’s failure to provide transportation.”

The ACLJ said its newest filing explains the school has an obligation to provide transportation and the law provides no excuse to refuse.

“This plain statutory language is not optional or in any way subject to the discretion of the school board. It contains no exception for if the interim transportation is costly or difficult. It instead reflects a basic policy judgment of the Ohio General Assembly; rather than force students to re-obtain their rights to transportation after a potentially lengthy process of mediation and administrative review, suffering all kinds of harms along the way, the general assembly made clear that if a student challenges a school board’s impracticality determination, the student is immediately entitled to transportation for as long as the dispute resolution lasts,” the team argued.

It pointed out to the court that the law “is not a suggestion.”

The fight, the ACLJ said, is “about the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children without undue government interference.”