Supporters of Jewish charter school file lawsuit challenging ban in Oklahoma

JTA — Supporters of a proposed Jewish school that was denied entry to Oklahoma’s charter school program filed a federal lawsuit in Oklahoma City on Tuesday, in the latest effort to legalize publicly funded religious charter schools in the United States.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to strike down Oklahoma’s ban on religious charter schools and to order the state to stop denying applicants on the basis of their religious character.

“We’re asking the court to end that blatant religious targeting and allow families to choose schools that are best for them,” Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman in Florida and founder of the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, said in a statement.

The lawsuit alleges that Oklahoma’s requirement that charter schools be “nonsectarian” is unconstitutional, citing the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The 23-page complaint, filed in the Western District of Oklahoma, was expected. Ben Gamla’s legal team, led by the prominent religious liberty firm Becket, was assembled before the application was even submitted last year, and its attorneys have said from the start that they anticipated it would be rejected. The group chose Oklahoma specifically to engineer a federal challenge to a constitutional question the US Supreme Court failed to resolve last spring, when it was deadlocked 4-4 over a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma City. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal in that case left the court unable to rule.

The complaint alleges that Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has displayed hostility toward minority religions, citing language in his earlier legal filings warning that allowing religious charter schools would force the state to fund “extreme sects of the Muslim faith” teaching “Sharia Law.”

Drummond has maintained that the question of religious charter schools was settled by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in a June 2024 ruling.

The case has produced the unusual spectacle of a defendant effectively siding with the plaintiff. The Statewide Charter School Board unanimously denied Ben Gamla’s application in February and again in March, but members said their hands were tied by the state court precedent and hired the conservative Christian legal group First Liberty Institute to argue in the school’s favor.

That prompted Drummond to file a separate lawsuit against the board in state court, accusing it of deliberately narrowing its rejection to the religious question alone, while suppressing other weaknesses in the application, in a bid to strengthen Ben Gamla’s case in federal court.

Oklahoma Jewish organizations have also opposed the proposal, saying they were not consulted and that there is little local demand for the school among the state’s fewer than 9,000 Jewish residents.

A hearing is expected later this year.