Mitchell v. Helms

Facts of the Case

At issue in Mitchell was implementation of Chapter 2 in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. During an average year in Jefferson Parish, about 30% of the federal Chapter 2 monies were allocated for nonpublic schools. Officials at the local educational agency (LEA), a public entity, used the funds to purchase library and media materials and instructional equipment, such as books; computers; computer software; slide, movie, and overhead projectors; maps; globes; and films that were then lent to the private schools. The nonpublic schools were selected for participation based on the applications they submitted to the LEA. The vast majority of the nonpublic schools that benefited from the program were religiously affiliated.

After a federal trial court upheld the constitutionality of Chapter 2, the Fifth Circuit reversed in favor of its opponents. On further review, a plurality of the Supreme Court upheld the statute as constitutional.

The Court's Ruling

In its analysis, the four-justice plurality in Mitchell focused on the effects prong of the Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) test, the long-time standard in disputes over the parameters of permissible state aid to religiously affiliated schools and their students, as modified by Agostini v. Felton (1997). The justices specifically considered whether the government assistance was neutral toward religion.

As the plurality explained, a court must answer two fundamental questions in evaluating whether governmental assistance is permissible under the Establishment Clause. The first question that the justices posed was whether the aid was offered to a broad range of groups or persons without regard to religion and, if so, whether it reached private institutions only as a result of genuine, independent private choices, so that it did not result in governmental indoctrination. The second question that the plurality identified was whether the criteria for allocating the aid were neutral and secular, so that they did not define recipients by reference to religion and thereby create financial incentives to undertake religious indoctrination.

The plurality in Mitchell found that Chapter 2 was constitutionally permissible for two reasons. First, the justices agreed that the program was constitutional, because all public and nonpublic schools were eligible to participate in it, while the amount of aid provided to individual schools was determined by the number of students enrolled in them. The plurality considered this to be factor that was controlled by the independent choices of parents and students, not state actors, such that any resulting religious indoctrination could not have been attributed to the government. Second, the plurality decided that the program was acceptable because it used neutral, secular eligibility criteria that neither favored nor disfavored religion. The plurality observed that this did not create a financial incentive to undertake religious indoctrination, because the aid was offered to a broad array of both public and private schools without regard to their religious affiliations.

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