PHOENIX — A national organization filed suit Wednesday against an Arizona charter school with ties to a member of the state Board of Education, accusing it of using state funds to illegally teach religious doctrine.
The federal court lawsuit claims that Heritage Academy, with three campuses in Maricopa County teaching grades 7 through 12, is violating the First Amendment, state constitutional provisions and Arizona laws through instruction and required reading.
Attorney Richard Katskee, legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said that includes instruction by the school’s founder, president and teacher Earl Taylor Jr. that the Ten Commandments, including those that mandate the worship of God, must be obeyed to attain happiness.
Another belief taught by the school, Katskee said, is that socialism violates God’s laws.
He said the school engages in a form of proselytizing by telling students “they are duty-bound to implement and instruct others about these religious and religiously based principles in order to restore the United States to freedom, prosperity and peace.”
Among the academy’s board members is Jared Taylor, who is Earl’s son. Jared Taylor was one of Gov. Doug Ducey’s first appointments last year to the state Board of Education.
Neither Taylor would comment on the lawsuit’s specifics. But the elder Taylor said he has answered similar allegations in the past for the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. Calls to Whitney Chapa, the board’s executive director who has access to those files, were not immediately returned.
Gubernatorial press aide Daniel Scarpinato said Ducey had no comment on the lawsuit.
Under Arizona law, private and for-profit corporations can set up charter schools, which are considered public schools entitled to state aid and cannot charge tuition.
They are exempt from some regulations that govern traditional public schools. A charter school is specifically required to “ensure that it is nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies and employment practices and all other operations.”
There also is a state constitutional provision barring the use of public money for religious instruction and a separate one forbidding the use of state taxes for any sectarian school.
Katskee wants Judge Eileen Willett to declare that Heritage Academy is using state funds in an illegal way.
“If it’s a private school that charges students tuition and gets no state money, it can teach religion. It can teach all the theology and religious doctrine that the school’s operators would like,” he said. But as a charter school, if it “won’t stop, then the state should have to stop giving it money and have to stop recognizing it as a public institution,” the attorney said.
No date has been set for a hearing.
Earl Taylor, in his bio on the academy’s website, said he set up the academy in 1995 to teach “the miraculous story of American’s founding and particularly the sources and principles upon which our country was founded.”
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is identified only as “John Doe” who is a parent of at least one student at the academy. Katskee said the anonymity is designed to keep the parent and student from being harassed.
“As a parent, Doe believes that it is his responsibility — not the state’s — to provide for his child or children’s religious education,” the lawsuit states.
The other named plaintiff is the Rev. David Felten, head pastor of the Fountains United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills. The lawsuit said Felten objects to the use of his tax dollars to support religious instruction at the academy.
