Here's a pretty important non-war item:
Tuesday September 25 11:45 AM ET
Supreme Court to Decide School Voucher Issue
By James Vicini
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) said on Tuesday it will decide whether vouchers, a program endorsed by President Bush (news - web sites) that uses tax dollars to pay student tuition at religious schools, are constitutional.
The justices, getting an early start on their new term that begins next Monday, agreed to review a U.S. appeals court ruling that struck down an experimental private school voucher program in Cleveland on the grounds it violated constitutional church-state separation.
The high court accepted the recommendation of the Bush administration to resolve once and for all whether such programs were a permissible way to expand educational choices for children enrolled in failing public schools.
``This is probably the most important church-state case in the last half-century,'' said Barry Lynn of the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. ``It will be a historic showdown over government funding of religion.''[ED. B.S. Its not about religion, its about freedom]
Voucher supporters agreed on the case's significance.
``This is the most important educational opportunity case since Brown v. Board of Education,'' Clint Bolick of the group Institute for Justice said, referring to the landmark 1954 ruling that ended school segregation.
The Cleveland program has allowed some 4,000 students from mostly low-income families to receive tuition vouchers of up to $2,500 apiece to attend other private or public schools if their parents decided local schools did not meet their needs.
The appeals court struck down the program because it used tax money to pay student tuition for schools with a religious affiliation, promoting religious education.
CASE MAY HAVE SWEEPING NATIONAL CONSEQUENCES
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the closely watched case early next year, with a decision due by the end of June. If the court upholds the Cleveland program, it would have sweeping national consequences for education policy.
The Supreme Court, with a 5-4 conservative majority, has handed down a string of recent rulings that lowered the wall of church-state separation by allowing some state involvement with religious schools. But it has never decided the voucher issue.
Supporters of vouchers maintained they promote competition in education and force public schools to improve while opponents argued they threaten the fiscal integrity of the nation's public school system.
School vouchers were a centerpiece of Bush's education platform during his presidential campaign.
The Ohio Pilot Project Scholarship program started in 1995 and covered kindergarten through eighth grade. The only other larger voucher program involving religious schools was in Milwaukee.
Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the Bush administration's top courtroom lawyer, said the Ohio program ``distributes educational aid on neutral terms ... without regard to religion.''
He said private choice helped ensure that the government was not seen as endorsing religion.
In one appeal to the Supreme Court, Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery said the case presented ``a fundamental constitutional issue of profound importance to education policy in the United States.'' Alabama, Delaware, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina all supported the appeal.
Private schools in Cleveland and five Cleveland families participating in the program also filed appeals.
Opponents of the program, including the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites), argued the appeals should be rejected.
They said the appeals court in its ruling properly applied a 1973 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a private school tuition payment program.
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