MD Kittle:

Who was the state superintendent who violated state law at the time? Gov. Tony Evers, who led the Department of Public Instruction for a decade before becoming governor in 2019.

WILL previously won its lawsuit after an appeals court ruled Evers’ DPI broke the law, but  the court did not resolve the core constitutional questions of religious liberty at stake in the case.

It’s been a long legal journey.

The legal battle goes back some six years, when, in 2016, WILL first took Evers and DPI to court after the agency denied transportation aid to St. Augustine School, a private and independent K-12 school in Colgate.

Wisconsin provides aid to qualifying private school students as long as there is not an overlapping attendance area between private schools that are affiliated with one another, or, more specifically, affiliated with the same sponsoring group.

In this case, DPI and Friess Lake School District (now part of Holy Hill Area School District) denied St. Augustine students busing rights because there is an Archdiocesan Catholic school in the attendance area. But St. Augustine is independent and unaffiliated with the Archdiocese.

The school district and DPI determined the definition of Catholic and withheld government benefits until St. Augustine agreed not to call itself “Catholic.”