Charter for Seven Oaks Classical School Challenged by Lawsuit

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A group of public education advocates filed a lawsuit in federal court today seeking to revoke the charter of Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville. The suit was filed by the local chapter of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, which is chaired by Monroe County Community School Board member Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer. The coalition is challenging the constitutionality of the Indiana law that allowed the new school to get a charter in the first place.

Seven Oaks, which opened at the beginning of this school year, was granted a charter by Grace College. Grace is an evangelical Christian college and seminary in northern Indiana.

An attorney representing the Coalition, Alex Tanford, says a religious institution should not be granting a charter to a public school.

“Things like whether to create schools and how to create them, that’s always been a matter for public officials to decide,” Tanford said. “And to take that discretion, and give it to an evangelical seminary seems to us to clearly cross that line that prohibits the establishment of religion.”

Grace College granted a charter to Seven Oaks after the group seeking to open the school was turned down twice by the Indiana Charter School Board. Tanford says the Coalition for Public Education – Monroe County has been considering filing this lawsuit for quite a while.

“The decision was made to wait and see what the outcome of the election was going to be first,” Tanford said. “To see if, for example, we had a Democratic governor or a Democratic superintendent of schools in the state so that one might be able to work this through as a matter of legislation and legislative policy, rather than litigation.”

In 2015 a member of the Seven Oaks school board, Terry English, said Seven Oaks would be more conservative than local public schools. Representatives of Seven Oaks have insisted religion would not be taught there.

Tanford says he expects a decision about the new lawsuit to take at least a year and a half.