 School choice advocates received a pretty strong precedent with today's ruling. On June 30th, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major win for school choice and religious liberty in a case argued by the Libertarian Public Interest Law Firm, the Institute for Justice. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that a state need not subsidize private education, but once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious. The plaintiff in the case, Kendra Espinoza, was able to send her kids to a private religious school in Montana thanks to a state scholarship subsidy program, which supplemented the extra income she made as a bookkeeper and night janitor. In 2018, the Montana Supreme Court killed that program, on the grounds that it violated the state constitutional prohibition on public funding for religious schools. Justice Roberts found that the Montana ruling expressly discriminates on the basis of religious status. That decision strengthens an earlier High Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of scholarship programs for sectarian schools. According to the Institute for Justice, the decision will have an impact on most of the 14 states where scholarship students who want to attend religious schools still face legal obstacles. I sat down with Kendra Espinoza in January, on the eve of her Supreme Court hearing. How does it feel to have your name on a Supreme Court case? Because that strikes me as probably the hardest way to get into a history book short of winning the presidency. It's humbling. Certainly, I had no idea when this case started that this would ever happen. No way of knowing that we would be at the U.S. Supreme Court, but to know that our name will forever be on a court case at the U.S. Supreme Court, that's pretty humbling, for sure. Tell me the story of how you got here today. It started with your girls who wanted to go to the school of their choice. Yes. The girls had originally been, I had homeschooled my girls prior to them being in public school, and it was a good fit, but life changed, and I had to go to work, and so then I had to put the girls in school. So they were at public school for a couple of years, and they didn't do terribly, but they didn't do well. And there were struggles there with other students, there were struggles with what they were learning, and I just didn't feel like they were challenged enough. I didn't feel like they were going to have as much opportunity as I wanted for them to have. And they weren't being taught the way that I would have taught them at home as far as their values. They were seeing things that I didn't want them to be seeing. So I started looking at other options and found Still Water Christian School was really hopeful that I could put them there, but of course my mind went to, wow, how can this possibly happen? There's no way I can afford this. And it just took some creativity and made it happen, and now they've been there for five years. So talk for me a little bit about the fact that I think when people think about school choice, and even when you think about the kind of challenges that parents face, sometimes you imagine a more dramatic situation. You think of a kid who's in a very unsafe public school or a kid who's being violently bullied, and I'm sort of interested in your case and the fact that you're the person who's going to end up bringing this to the court, because for you it was just more about a bad fit. But I think a lot of parents identify with that, and you really do want the school that's right for your kids. Can you talk about what it was that was the real distinction between the public school and Still Water for you? Sure. Because I raised my girls in a Christian home and because we had that background of homeschooling, that Christian education was foundational to me. I really wanted them to be taught the same way that I taught them at home. I wanted those values to be the same. I wanted them to see things that we would see at home, and certainly there's going to be challenges at a private school to some degree that there might be at a public school, but I don't think to the same level. And I just found that the kids at the school were different than the kids at the private school. There's much more of a family atmosphere at the private school, but the academics are so much farther ahead than at the public school. And I just felt like they were not challenged enough, and I wanted more for them. I wanted more opportunities for them as they grow up. I wanted them to grow up to be responsible citizens and contribute to their community around them, but to learn to be challenged in life and not just kind of coast through on things I wanted them to strive for more. So you mentioned that you were worried about being able to afford the school of your choice. Walk me through how the scholarship program worked in Montana for you, but also what other things you looked at in order to afford the school that you wanted. Yeah. The school has a financial assistance program as well. And then there's a couple of other scholarship programs. So there's the Big Sky Scholarships and then A Scholarships. And there's an application, obviously, process for both of those and for their financial assistance at the school. I was working my regular full-time job, and then I've been working always, always had a second job. At some points, I've had three jobs. So I would do my regular job in the daytime and then either bookkeeping or office work from home, which is what I'm doing right now, or janitorial, commercial janitorial in the evenings and on weekends as well. The girls would come and help me with the janitorial work because that was an opportunity for them to learn good work skills and work ethic and learn how to put effort into something that they want. And so they wanted to continue to stay at the school. It was important to them. And so they were willing to come and help me work, doing janitorial work on the evenings and weekends. And how did the scholarship programs work? Are those funded by the state? They are not funded by the state. So the programs that the donors are private donors, contributing to a private organization, and the donors will get a measly tax credit at the end of the year. So if they were to contribute $500 to the scholarship organization, they would get a tax credit of up to $150. But it's not state money. It is private donations to a private organization who then looks at the applications and decides who is eligible to receive and then how much they would be eligible to receive. Who else is in the scholarship pool with you and your girls? Do you have a sense of the other families? Are they all going to religious schools? There's only one non-religious school in our valley where we live. As far as Montana goes, I believe that the majority of the private schools are religious schools. I don't know what the stats are as far as how many there are, but I know that there's only one other one in our valley, and that's not somewhere that I wanted my girls to go. The other families, they are probably medium to low income families. I know that all of them are willing to work hard and they all contribute a significant amount to their children's tuition every year, just like we do. But that funding, that extra bit of tuition and assistance really does help our family to be able to continue to stay there. But for people in your area and maybe really in your state, school choice necessarily means looking at schools with a religious affiliation. There just aren't that many secular private options. So talk about, one of the keywords in this case is discrimination, and I think it's actually a sort of a difficult thing to be asked to step forward and say we're being discriminated against. That there's a long history of court cases where the Supreme Court or other courts have attempted to sort out the question of what discrimination is and what it really looks like. Did you experience discrimination? Would you say that that's a correct way to describe what your family has gone through? Absolutely. I believe that because the Montana Supreme Court struck down the entire program to ensure that no students of religious affiliation were to receive these scholarships, it felt like discrimination because the whole intent of them, the whole reason that they shut down the program in the first place was to make sure that nobody of religious background got a scholarship. Would you say that your family is typical of your neighborhood, of your community? Is there a way in which you are different than the public school population? I guess I'm just interested in, when we think about school choice, we think about the different needs of different families. How did you know that the public schools weren't right for you and what sort of sets your family apart from others that led you to make that choice? I don't think it was much more than the fact that we have a faith, I wanted a faith-based education. I wanted that same, I wanted the same element of faith in being able to be able to pray and being able to read the Bible and study the Bible. That was important to me. And I think a lot of the public school, there may be other Christians there at the public school, but that's not how they're taught. And they're not taught to, the children aren't taught to develop their character from a values perspective. They're maybe taught rote memory and they're taught some basic academics, but they're not taught from a values-based perspective at all. How do you think what you're asking for the courts to do squares with the values of the separation of church and state? I don't think there is an issue there. I believe that because these funds are donated privately by private citizens, I don't believe that the funds don't come from the government at all in any way. I don't believe that a tax credit would be constituted as public funds because the money hasn't essentially ever gone to the, or come from the government. Even as someone who follows school choice issues, I actually found that to be a really surprising and interesting aspect of this case. I think many people would imagine that what you and other parents are asking for is for taxpayer money to pay for private school. That's not the case here. It's not the case actually in many school choice programs. There have been other states who have set up similar models where there's a tax credit or some kind of incentive for private charitable giving. Do you think people should be allowed to give their money as they want or should there be restrictions on how people can give charity in general? We are a free country. We should be allowed to give to whomever we choose to give to. And if there's a program available for a tax credit, absolutely access that. And those receiving the scholarship funds should be able to use them where they choose to use them. What are you anticipating for next year for your girls' school? The same thing. And every year it's that same question. Can we afford this? Can we keep going? We will continue to work hard and make the extra income that we need. But I anticipate if we win on this case and the funds are there for the program to continue, then we should be able to make it as we have been all this time. Cost of tuition will go up next year because now we will be in high school so the cost will increase at that point. So again, we have to look at that and you look at our budget and say how much can we, what can we put aside? What can we, extra can we bring in or how can we bring in extra income? You've had a lot of uncertainty over the last several years between the case and just your family's kind of changes in individual choices. How does an uncertainty play out for your family? How does that determine, you know, how you think about your future? I have never been one to panic, I suppose. Take each day as it comes. I lot of prayer and just looking at the budget and I keep a pretty tight budget and I watch that often and if it's something that we really want, I'm willing to work for it, whatever that takes, we're willing to work hard to make that happen. There comes a point where we can only work so many extra hours and so then we really rely on programs such as the scholarship program. If that's not available and other programs aren't available, then we have to consider going back to public school which wouldn't be necessarily a good fit for us. Do you think there are other kinds of schools or other types of education that shouldn't be eligible for this type of tax credit? No, I think that if the program is available to the general public, I think it should be available to anybody that accesses it regardless of what school they go to. Would you say that you expected to wind up where you are now with your family when you started looking at school options for your girls? No, absolutely, I had no idea we would end up here. In fact, I had no idea that we would even be involved in any sort of a case like this and we were approached by the Institute for Justice to partner with them and become a part of this case with them. And my intent was, yes, I would be glad to help out because this makes a difference for other people, not just for our family. And at the time, I wasn't a US citizen, I was a Canadian citizen still, but I had legal permanent residency and I had for like 14 years up to that point. But I thought, well, I can't vote in a federal election so here's my opportunity to do something for the community. Have no way of knowing that we would take it to this level and that we would be here today. So it's a really, it's a big surprise for us. Thank you so much for coming in to talk with us. I really appreciate it, Kendra. Thank you.