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Statutory Interpretation – School District Transportation

By: Derek Hawkins//March 14, 2022//

Statutory Interpretation – School District Transportation

By: Derek Hawkins//March 14, 2022//

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: St. Augustine School, et al., v. Jill Underly, et al.,

Case No.: 17-2333

Officials: RIPPLE, KANNE, and WOOD, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Statutory Interpretation – School District Transportation

The State of Wisconsin provides transportation benefits to most of its school-aged children. See Wis. Stat. §§ 121.51, 121.54. For private-school students, however, it limits those benefits to only one school “affiliated or operated by a single sponsoring group” within any given attendance area. That may seem like a straightforward criterion, but the fact that this case is now on its second trip to the Seventh Circuit, after intermediate stops at the Supreme Court of the United States and the Wisconsin Supreme Court, demonstrates that complexities abound when a private school’s affiliation is religious in nature. The particular question before us is whether the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, then Tony Evers (the present Governor of the state), correctly decided that St. Augustine School, a freestanding entity that describes itself as Catholic but independent of the church’s hierarchy, is “affiliated with or operated by” the same sponsoring group as St. Gabriel High School, which is run by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and therefore indisputably Catholic. (Governor Evers’s successor in the post of Superintendent is now Jill Underly, whom we have substituted as the appellee.)

We conclude that the Superintendent’s decision in the case before us was not justified by neutral and secular considerations, but instead necessarily and exclusively rested on a doctrinal determination that both St. Augustine and St. Gabriel’s were part of a single sponsoring group—the Roman Catholic church—because their religious beliefs, practices, or teachings were similar enough. The fact that the Superintendent reached this result largely just by looking at St. Augustine’s description of itself on its website does not matter—the doctrinal conclusion was an inescapable part of the decision. We therefore reverse the judgment of the district court and remand for further proceedings.

Reversed and remanded

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Derek A Hawkins is Corporate Counsel, at Salesforce.

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