Education: School-Aid Test

Nearly one-half of the U.S.’s 42,429 school systems have no public high schools. The shortcoming is most often met by sending students to another district; but in Vermont such high-school-shy systems have since 1915 been allowed to send children to private schools, including Roman Catholic high schools.

When a South Burlington taxpayer named C. Raymond Swart (who has no school age children) sued to enjoin the school board from paying tuition to three Catholic high schools, the Vermont State

Supreme Court last year ruled in his favor. “However worthy the object,” said the court, “the First Amendment commands the State shall not participate.”

Last month Lawyer Paul Butler, a Catholic and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Butler saw it as “an opportunity which may never come again to enlighten the President, the Congress, the States, the bench, the bar, the school authorities, the private educators and the country as a whole, as to what the First Amendment permits or prohibits in the form of direct financial payments of public funds to sectarian schools or to their pupils.” Last week the Supreme Court refused to review the Vermont decision; the net effect, politically, was a blow at the use of public funds for parochial schools.