Hearings opened in Federal District Court today in the first suit brought against a parochiaid statute since the US Supreme Court’s ruling last June 28 that state aid to religious sponsored schools was unconstitutional. The suit was filed by the Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty (PEARL), a coalition of 31 civic, religious, education, labor and civil rights organizations and 14 individual plaintiffs against New York State’s $33 million purchase-of-services law which was singed by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller on the very day the Supreme Court rendered its decision.
Arguing the case today, PEARL’s special counsel, Leo Pfeffer, contended that the New York law was no different from the parochiaid laws of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Connecticut which the Supreme Court’s decision struck down. The New York law to provide acceptable secular educational services for pupils in nonpublic schools, includes teachers’ salaries and other instructional costs of private and parochial schools. The PEARL suit named as defendants State Comptroller Arthur Levitt and Commissioner of Education Ewald B. Nyquist.
Pfeffer noted that both the outlawed Pa. law and the N.Y. statute defined a “crisis in elementary and secondary education” as a reason for allocating state funds. He observed that in deciding the R.I. case, the Supreme Court stated, the very existence of a financial crisis in church-school financing was an additional ground for invalidating the statutes because it would potentially divide religious belief and practice.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
