Eulitt ex rel. Eulitt v. Maine, Dept. of Educ.

• Decision Date: 22 October 2004
• Docket Number: No. 04-1496.,04-1496.
• Citation: 386 F.3d 344
• Parties: John EULITT and Belinda Eulitt, as Parents and Next Friends of Cathleen N. Eulitt, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. State of MAINE, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

386 F.3d 344

John EULITT and Belinda Eulitt, as Parents and Next Friends of Cathleen N. Eulitt, et al., Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. State of MAINE, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 04-1496.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard September 9, 2004.

Decided October 22, 2004.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Maine, 307 F.Supp.2d 158, John A. Woodcock, Jr., J.

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Stephen C. Whiting, with whom The Whiting Law Firm, P.A. was on brief, for appellants.

Paul Stern, Deputy Attorney General, with whom G. Steven Rowe, Attorney General, William H. Laubenstein, III, and Sarah A. Forster, Assistant Attorneys General, were on brief, for appellees.

Robert H. Chanin, Andrew D. Roth, Laurence Gold, Bredhoff & Kaiser, P.L.L.C., Elliott M. Mincberg, Judith E. Schaeffer, Ayesha N. Khan, Zachary L. Heiden, Jeffrey A. Thaler, and Bernstein, Shur, Sawyer & Nelson, P.A. on consolidated brief for Maine Education Association, National Education Association, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way Foundation, and Maine Civil Liberties Union, amici curiae.

Before BOUDIN, Chief Judge, SELYA, Circuit Judge, and SCHWARZER,^* Senior District Judge.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This case calls upon us to decide whether the Equal Protection Clause requires Maine to extend tuition payments to private sectarian secondary schools on behalf of students who reside in a school district that makes such payments available on a limited basis to private nonsectarian secondary schools. We hold that the Equal Protection Clause does not impose any such obligation. Accordingly, although our reasoning differs from that of the district court, we affirm the entry of summary judgment in the defendants' favor.

I. BACKGROUND

By statute, Maine commits to providing all school-aged persons with "an opportunity to receive the benefits of a free public education," Me.Rev.Stat. Ann. tit. 20-A, § 2(1) (West 2004), and vests authority in local school districts to fulfill that undertaking by maintaining and supporting elementary and secondary education, id. §§ 2(2), 4501. School districts, known in Maine's bureaucratic argot as school administrative units, enjoy some flexibility in administering this guarantee. They may satisfy the state mandate in any of three ways: by operating their own public schools, see id. § 1258(1), by contracting with outside public schools to accept their students, see id. §§ 1258(2), 2701; or by paying private schools to provide such an education, see id. §§ 2951, 5204(4). State law bars a school district that exercises the third option from paying tuition to any private sectarian school. Id. § 2951(2).

The town of Minot comprises a school administrative unit. It has decided to operate its own grade school (kindergarten through eighth grade), but has chosen to outsource secondary education. To this end, Minot has contracted with a neighboring school district — the town of Poland — to educate at least 90% of its eligible students at Poland Regional High School (PRHS). The contract gives Minot the right to send up to 10% of its high schoolers to other approved nonsectarian secondary schools (private or public) so long as those students can demonstrate that they have educational needs that PRHS cannot satisfy. The superintendent of School Union # 29, which consists of the school administrative units of Poland, Mechanic Falls, and Minot, reviews applications for such alternative placements on a case-by-case basis. By operation of section 2951(2), however, sectarian schools cannot win approval for publicly funded tuition payments (and, thus, Minot cannot underwrite tuition for youths seeking to attend such schools).

John and Belinda Eulitt and Kelly J. MacKinnon are parents residing in Minot who, on their own dime, send their daughters to St. Dominic's Regional High School, a Catholic secondary school that is indisputably sectarian. They believe that, under Minot's education plan, the state and the town should pay tuition directly to St. Dominic's on behalf of their daughters because PRHS does not offer classes in Catholic doctrine or teach from a Catholic viewpoint (and, therefore, does not meet the full range of their daughters' educational needs). The parents have not submitted formal applications for such funding because section 2951(2), which forbids the payment of public dollars to sectarian schools, would prevent the superintendent from approving any such applications. Instead, as parents and next friends of their daughters, they brought suit in Maine's federal district court against various state educational authorities. Pertinently, their complaint alleged that section 2951(2)'s restriction on the approval of sectarian schools for placements funded by public tuition payments violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because that restriction discriminates on the bases of religion, religious speech, and viewpoint. Additionally, the complaint asserted a separate equal protection claim on behalf of St. Dominic's, in which the parents argued that section 2951(2) strips the school of equal protection of the laws because it denies the school the ability to receive public funds for providing secondary education services even though it allows private nonsectarian schools to receive such stipends.

In due course, the parties cross-moved for summary judgment. The district court referred the motions to a magistrate judge who recommended, inter alia, that summary judgment be granted in favor of the defendants on the equal protection claims. Eulitt v. Me. Dep't of Educ., No. 02-162, 2003 WL 21909790, at *4 (D.Me. Aug.8, 2003). The magistrate judge ruled that the Equal Protection Clause does not compel the provision of public funds to private sectarian schools, even when a school district has chosen to subsidize the payment of tuition to private nonsectarian schools on a limited basis. Id. at *3-4. On objection, see 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1); Fed. R.Civ.P. 72(b), the district court concurred with the magistrate judge's recommended decision, but it did so solely on the ground that this court's decision in Strout v. Albanese, 178 F.3d 57 (1st Cir.1999), had "authoritatively answered exactly the same questions Plaintiffs now urge this Court to decide," and, therefore, pretermitted further inquiry under the doctrine of stare decisis. Eulitt v. Me. Dep't of Educ., 307 F.Supp.2d 158, 161 (D.Me.2004). This appeal ensued.

II. ANALYSIS

The appellants hawk three propositions on appeal. First, they urge that the doctrine of stare decisis does not foreclose consideration of their substantive claims. Second, they contend that the Establishment Clause does not compel Maine to eschew public funding of sectarian education (and, hence, does not prevent the state from providing the redress that they seek). Third, they asseverate that section 2951(2) violates the Equal Protection Clause because it discriminates on the bases of religion, religious speech, and viewpoint. We consider these propositions sequentially.

A. Stare Decisis.

As a general matter, the doctrine of stare decisis precludes the relitigation of legal issues that have previously been heard and authoritatively determined. Stewart v. Dutra Constr. Co., 230 F.3d 461, 467 (1st Cir.2000). In other words, stare decisis "renders the ruling of law in a case binding in future cases before the same court or other courts owing obedience to the decision." Gately v. Massachusetts, 2 F.3d 1221, 1226 (1st Cir.1993) (emphasis in original). For present purposes, the question reduces to whether our earlier decision in Strout constitutes such a bar.

Strout arose in a very similar posture. There, we upheld the constitutionality of section 2951(2) against equal protection, establishment, and free exercise challenges brought by parents (not the present plaintiffs) who sought public funding for their children's matriculation at St. Dominic's. Strout, 178 F.3d at 64-65. The Strout panel rejected the equal protection challenge because Maine had shown a compelling interest in avoiding an Establishment Clause violation through the exclusion of sectarian schools from its secondary education tuition program. Id. at 64. Two members of the panel further speculated, in dictum, that if Maine's proffered interest had been found to depend upon an erroneous understanding of the Establishment Clause (that is, if it had been determined that payments to sectarian schools were permissible under that clause), then the state's exclusion of sectarian schools from the tuition program would not withstand scrutiny. Id. at 64 n. 12.

Three years later, the Supreme Court decided Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639, 122 S.Ct. 2460, 153 L.Ed.2d 604 (2002). That opinion altered the landscape of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the school finance context by upholding a program that allowed income-qualified parents in Cleveland to elect to apply state-funded school vouchers toward their children's tuition at private sectarian schools. Id. at 644-46, 663, 122 S.Ct. 2460. The Zelman Court announced that indirect public aid to sectarian education is constitutionally permissible when the financial assistance program has a valid secular purpose, provides benefits to a broad spectrum of individuals who can exercise genuine private choice among religious and secular options, and is neutral toward religion. Id. at 662-63., 122 S.Ct. 2460

Last term, the Supreme Court again addressed the application of the First Amendment to educational funding issues. The Court upheld a Washington state college scholarship program that prohibited the application of scholarship funds toward the pursuit of a devotional theology degree. Locke v. Davey, 540 U.S. 712, 124 S.Ct. 1307, 1309, 158 L.Ed.2d 1 (2004). In so doing, the Court reaffirmed that "`there is room for play in the joints'" between the Religion...