The New York State Court of Appeals, New York’s highest state court, has ruled that regulations implementing the New York State compulsory educations law do not authorize the State Education Department to order the shutting down of yeshivas. This applies even to those yeshivas the Department deems as not providing an education “substantially equivalent” to what is provided in the public schools. The ruling also held that the state also had no authority to direct parents to unenroll their children from the schools. The compulsory education law imposes the “substantially equivalent “standard on non-public school education in the state.
The rulings came in a case brought by PEARLS (Parents for Educational and Religious Liberty in Schools) which has been waging a decade-long battle to secure the right of yeshiva parents to control the upbringing and education of their children.
Importantly, the Court of Appeals also confirmed that parents can combine educational sources in order to satisfy the compulsory education obligation. That is, if the schools can’t be forced to close and children can’t be forced to unenroll, the practical effect is that parents can supplement any missing instruction through home schooling or at an after-school program, thereby avoiding the scheduling conflicts with religious study triggered by rigid state regulations.
As PEARLS has noted, the Court of Appeals decision has important implications for the six schools that the state has directed to close, and to the dozens of parents whose children were denied special education services at those schools for the coming school year. The denials were based on the State Education Department’s determination that those yeshivas “are no longer schools” and that children can no longer attend them. But the Court of Appeals has now ruled that the state can’t make those determinations.
To be sure, we would have preferred that the case would have been more sweepingly decided on the basis of principles of religious freedom and not on the language of a particular statute. But still, the bottom line is that the Court of Appeals has now seriously limited the control that state education authorities can exercise over yeshivas and yeshiva parents.
