New York State legislators are expected to negotiate and come up with a final response to Governor Cuomo’s proposed state budget this month. Cuomo’s proposed budget has a series of tax credits under the Parental Choice in Education Act.
The act would include tax breaks for teachers to buy school supplies and for donors to invest in programs that would improve public schools. It would also give tax credits to parents who sent their students to religious or private schools, and to donors who set up scholarship funds for students who couldn’t otherwise afford that education. Those tax credits have left religious leaders in New York divided over the merits of that money.
Opponents say that tax credits for religious schools would erode a crucial barrier between religious and state institutions that allow houses of worship to stand outside of certain laws. Supporters say that religious schools are a public service that offer students an affordable, high quality education with much less cost to taxpayers than public schools.
Average tuition fees at Catholic schools are $5,000 to $8,000, says Jim Cultrara, an advocate for Catholic education with the New York State Catholic Conference. “And the church pays about $2000 on top of that. But in the public school system, tuition costs the taxpayer about $22,000.”
Cultrara says while Catholic schools have plenty of demand from parents seeking a religious education, many balk at the tuition fees, making it hard for the schools to stay afloat. New York State has about 520 Catholic schools, and 75 of them have shut down in the last five years. Cultrara says when Catholic schools shut down, students enter the public school system, causing a greater fiscal burden for taxpayers.
Speaking last year at an event in favor of the tax credit, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York said the tax credit wouldn’t just benefit Catholic school students. He said it would help all students by giving them choices about whether they wanted a religious education and by including tax credits that would benefit public schools.
“This is all about keeping our schools strong, affordable and accessible,” said Dolan. “This is far from just a Catholic issue, but all religions or none at all, who are devoted to our children.”
The bill also has support from some leaders of the Jewish community, where many send their students to religious day schools. But, members of another minority religion are skeptical. Samir Kalra, with the Hindu American Foundation, says the bill probably wouldn’t help his community.
“Yeah, theoretically it could benefit Hindu schools,” says Kalra, the foundation’s senior director. “But you know, the practical reality is that most of these schools are Catholic and Christian schools.”
Kalra says another problem is that religious schools aren’t subject to the same civil rights laws as public schools. Exceptions to federal employment law allow religious institutions to favor people with the same faith when they’re hiring, he notes, “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion, has an exemption that allows religiously affiliated employers to consider religion in some of their employment decisions, specifically by favoring those of the same faith in hiring decisions.”
Kalra says it’s not fair to pay for discrimination with public dollars. “As a minority religious group, in particular, we’re very sensitive to any government support for any religion,” he says. “We want to make sure that line is maintained.”
Mark Lukens, the leader of Interfaith Alliance in Long Island, also wants to maintain that line for reasons of his own. “The problem is that once we become beholden to the state,” he says, “we become, in a sense, on the state’s payroll.”
Lukens, who’s also the pastor at ?Bethany Congregational Church in East Rockaway, says tax credits are “very tempting” for struggling religious institutions, but they can start churches down a slippery slope. “That weakens our ability to be voices in the public square,” he says. “At times, we have to make moral objections to the actions of the state, so we need to be independent.”
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office wouldn’t comment for this story. Last spring, he wrote the tax credits into his executive budget bill, but he took it out during the budget’s final negotiations. This year, it’s back in his budget again.
New York Public Interest Research Group’s executive director Blair Horner explains that by putting the act in his executive budget, Cuomo is making it easier for the act to pass. “The governor has enormous leverage in budget negotiations the way the system is set up,” he says. NYPIRG isn’t taking a stance on this issue.
Horner explains that whether the tax credit is passed depends on how much New York’s Assembly and Senate leaders want to stand in its way. Each of those houses will be giving their responses to the Governor’s budget this week. Then, negotiations start on the whole budget. And the tax credit just will be one item of many on Cuomo’s enormous wish list.
“They’re supposed to wrap it all up by the end of this month,” he says. “So, the clock’s ticking and we’re getting to showtime.”