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A legal fight is brewing over religious charter schools in Tennessee after the attorney general said the state’s law blocking them is “likely” unconstitutional and a Christian nonprofit in Knox County sued the local board of education over its charter school requirements.
The state law banning religious charters has not yet been legally challenged, nor has any lawmaker proposed legislation to amend the current law.
But the Knox County lawsuit, which uses Tennessee’s new education savings account program as part of its argument, could bring a fresh challenge to the religious charter issue that deadlocked the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.
Charter schools, or publicly funded but independently managed schools, have received broad bipartisan support across the country for decades as an alternative to private schools. Nonreligious charter schools were legalized in Tennessee in 2002.