ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 16, 1997 TAG: 9701160060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MADISON, WIS.
SOURCE: Associated Press
In a school-choice case that is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a state judge Wednesday struck down Gov. Tommy Thompson's plan to use taxpayer money to send poor Milwaukee children to religious schools.
Judge Paul Higginbotham also blocked the state from expanding its first-in-the nation program of giving tuition vouchers to Milwaukee youngsters to attend private, non-religious schools. The state wanted to expand it from 1,650 students to 15,000.
That ruling could force some students back into public schools next fall unless a higher court acts otherwise before then.
``It's a big step backward,'' Robert Rauh, principal at Urban Day School in Milwaukee, where 416 of the 860 students are there on vouchers. Fifty voucher students who enrolled this year now may have to leave.
``We'll try to find a way to keep them here,'' Rauh said.
The Republican governor has promoted the tuition voucher program as a national model.
```School choice' may in fact be sound public policy, especially considering the sad plight of the Milwaukee Public Schools system,'' Higginbotham wrote.
But he said the plan to expand the idea to parochial schools violates the Wisconsin constitution because it ``compels Wisconsin citizens of varying religious faiths to support schools with their tax dollars that proselytize students and attempt to inculcate them with beliefs contrary to their own.''
Higginbotham already had temporarily blocked the vouchers for religious schools.
Since 1990, Wisconsin has allowed some poor children to attend private schools in Milwaukee at state expense. But Thompson proposed and the Legislature approved expanding the program to cover more students and include religious schools - an idea the American Civil Liberties Union challenged as violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
The expansion's defenders, including Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, have argued that it is constitutional because the primary purpose is to give parents freedom to choose schools for their children.
The state Supreme Court granted the ACLU's request to block the expansion. But the high court deadlocked 3-3 last March on the constitutionality of religious school choice and sent the case to Higginbotham.
He struck down the expansion of the number of students on more technical grounds. He said that because of the expansion, school choice was no longer an experiment with a statewide purpose - the way the Legislature approved it - but instead amounted to an unconstitutional ``local or private bill.''
The state pays participating schools about $3,600 per student. Expansion to 15,000 students would send about $55 million in public dollars to private schools.
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