Testimony for Oklahoma’s Charter School Board By Bruce Prescott, PhD April 11, 2023

I am a retired Baptist minister. Before retiring, I served as Executive Director of a religious non-profit organization called Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists for more than twenty years. At Mainstream Baptists, we worked to preserve the Baptist legacy of the equal right to religious liberty for all people and fought efforts to undermine the constitutional separation of religion and government in this country.

I am also a retired educator. In public schools, I taught Police Science courses for public High School students for Albuquerque Public Schools through the Technical Vocation Institute. Later, I taught philosophy and religion courses at Tarrant County Junior College in Texas and once served in an adjunct capacity at the OU College of Liberal Studies. In private schools, I have taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.

One of the hallmarks of the American public school system is that our public schools are secular and nondiscriminatory in their acceptance of all students -- regardless of their faith or belief. Oklahoma charter schools are public schools. To treat them as private schools would up end the entire educational landscape in Oklahoma. For public schools to require students to receive religious instruction, to go to chapel services and pray would violate the religious freedom of students, families, and taxpayers.

The applicant for this charter school openly declares that its mission is to evangelize through its educational curriculum and instruction, and it seeks public funds for this purpose. If this is permitted, then every religious group in the state will be seeking public funds for their own religious schools. This is a recipe for the kind of religious strife and conflict that led many of our ancestors to leave the countries of their birth in search of liberty of conscience and religious freedom.

Approving St. Isidore’s application would introduce other problems as well. The school’s application makes clear that it plans to discriminate in admissions and employment. The government should never fund discrimination -- no taxpayer-funded school should be allowed to turn away teachers or students because they are of the “wrong” religion, or are in a same-sex relationship, or have a gender identity different than was assigned to them on a birth certificate, or have a disability, or simply become pregnant.

Oklahoma is a religiously diverse state, and all public schools, including public charter schools, must be open and welcoming to all. Religious education—like houses of worship—should be funded through voluntary contributions from members. That is why I urge you to deny the application for this charter school.