Colorado punishes families for choosing Catholic schools | Opinion - USA Today

Erika Nagle spends nearly three hours a day in the car driving her children to school. The cost of living in Castle Rock, Colorado, is better, but she’s willing to make the sacrifice to trek to St. Mary’s parish school in the Archdiocese of Denver because of, in her words, “just how amazing and extraordinary the school is.”

The state of Colorado is making her sacrifice even more. St. Mary’s has been excluded by the state from a purportedly universal preschool tuition benefit program it launched in 2023. The program is designed to give each child 15 hours or approximately $6,000 toward annual tuition.

The reason? Catholic schools don’t qualify because of their religious teachings on marriage and sexuality.

Nagle has, to date, forgone $18,000 in tuition aid she would have gotten had she sent her kids to any other preschool in Colorado. On Nov. 3, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy to determine whether that amounts to religious discrimination.

Until the case is resolved, countless families sacrificing to send their kids to Catholic schools are losing out on dollars they might otherwise spend on summer camps, braces or the many other costs that inevitably come with raising kids.

Dan and Lisa Sheley have five of their seven children already attending St. Mary’s and hope their younger two will attend as well. Dan is a police officer, and Lisa left a job she loved in parks and recreation to work at the school, giving her the chance to stay closely connected to her kids' education, while also getting a tuition discount.

Lisa, a five-generation native Coloradan, told me how much she and her husband cherish the Catholic education their kids are getting and the way it has grown their faith: “They come and do things at the church. They do adoration without us asking them to. And as a parent, that’s the best I can ask for, that my child has that root in faith and knows that God loves them.”

But she said she feels like the family is “being punished for this and forced to pay more ... because we have chosen an education centered around God and our faith.”

Dan said the couple pulled their kids out of the Colorado public school system, as so many parents around the country are doing, when the schools “radically changed their curriculum” and started introducing ideologies, like age-inappropriate gender ideology, that contradicted their faith.

Nationwide, public schools are seeing declines in enrollment, with the COVID-19 pandemic marking a clear turning point.

Many families have turned to Catholic schools, which reopened long before the public schools, and stayed. The Catholic schools in Maryland, where I send my own kids, are now bursting at the seams with public school evacuees.

But Colorado’s discriminatory policy is hurting its Catholic schools. Many interested families end up going elsewhere because of the financial incentive to attend schools that qualify for tuition reimbursement.

“It breaks my heart,” Erika Nagle said. It also concerns her because of her own heritage as a Cuban American. Freedom of religion “was one of the very first things that was taken away in the revolution.”

The public school district in Montgomery County, where I live, was involved in a Supreme Court case concerning efforts to require preschoolers to take explicit gender ideology lessons, regardless of parental wishes, I completely understand Dan Sheley when he says choosing Catholic schools is a “no-brainer.”

It should also be a no-brainer for the Supreme Court that selectively choosing one category of preschool to exclude from a supposedly universal benefit violates the First Amendment. As Dan said to me: “To have the state just say, 'Because of your beliefs, you don’t get this, you’re not allowed,' is really upsetting. We pay the taxes, too. Why can’t we have it?”

Ashley McGuire is a senior fellow with The Catholic Association and a mom of five children who attend Catholic schools.