SYRACUSE, N.Y.

IN THE FRANTIC, final days of the recent legislative session in the Rhode Island General Assembly, the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee voted against a controversial measure submitted by Rep. Edith H. Ajello (D.-Providence). The proposed bill called for eliminating several services, including textbooks and busing, provided to private- and parochial-school students by local school districts. A 10-to-1 vote of no passage was issued by the committee on June 17.

The arguments on both sides were presented in terms of cost/benefit analysis. The position of the Providence school district, for example, was that the city spends $3.3 million a year in providing aid for non-public school students. For its part, the Catholic Diocese, the largest recipient of such aid, maintained that public services for parochial-school students lets its schools stay open and thus prevents its students from flooding the public system. A March 2007 report, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Catholic Schools: Beacons of Hope,” found that parochial schools save the state nearly $200 million a year in education costs.

Note that First Amendment concerns and issues involving the separation of church and state were not raised by those opposing aid to non-public education. However, in the 1960s a contentious battle over publicly funded textbooks for private-school students was a major political and constitutional controversy in Rhode Island.

The textbook controversy began in September 1961, when Msgr. Arthur Geoghegan, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Providence, made a request for aid to the state commissioner of education to help offset the rising cost of education materials. The first textbook-loan program was passed in Louisiana in 1928. Geoghegan expressed hope that his plan would be discussed “as an issue of national needs and students’ best interests, not a religious issue.”

The Rev. Hale Thornberry, executive secretary of the Rhode Island Baptist Convention, saw things differently. Thornberry said that the diocese should stop “manipulating itself into a favored position and to reach into public funds for the support of its work.” The state’s Baptist community had vehemently opposed aid to parochial schools since 1937, when the General Assembly passed a transportation statute that provided busing for non-public-school students.

On Jan. 9, 1962, Gov. John A. Notte, moved by additional pleas from Geoghegan’s office, called for a public airing of the constitutionality of the proposed legislation and the expense of any state assistance. On Feb.27, 1963, Gov. John Chafee, who defeated Notte in the 1962 election, signed off on a statute authorizing school committees in every community to loan free of charge upon request textbooks in mathematics, science and modern foreign languages to all elementary- and secondary-school students. The law had only limited effect in the 1963-64 school year because most private schools had already purchased their texts, but the following year the program entered into full swing.

On Feb. 16, 1965, a bill of equity in Rhode Island Superior Court was brought by Frederick E. Bowerman and four other Cranston residents. Cranston residents had also raised the most serious constitutional objection to the transportation of parochial-school students on city-owned buses in 1953. The plaintiffs in the case of Bowerman v. O’Connor were taxpayers who sued the members of the school committee and its chairman, John O’Connor. The complaint also alleged that the statute permitted a diversion of funds to support non-public purposes, in violation of the First Amendment.

After hearing from both sides, Judge Fred Perkins agreed. Drawing from the basic tenets of the brief prepared by Milton Stanzler, of the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union, Perkins maintained that “in the case of furnishing textbooks the expenditure of public moneys does not stop at the door to the school, but overflows into the school itself . . . a school under religious auspices the support of which basically is banned by the First Amendment.” The Rev. Edward Mullen, assistant diocesan superintendent of schools, said that Perkins’s decision “enshrine[d]” what he believed was a “Protestant theological interpretation of the First Amendment.”

A significant development in the battle over textbooks in Rhode Island occurred in June 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the landmark case of Board of Education v. Allen, affirmed a decision of the New York Court of Appeals, which had upheld a similar statute. The appeal in the Bowerman case was summarily sustained by the state Supreme Court on Oct. 28, 1968, and the judgment of the Superior Court was reversed. Mullen noted that the court’s decision was possibly “the key to survival of Catholic education here in Rhode Island.”

The present financial crisis at both the state and municipal levels will ensure that the debate over educational mandates affecting parochial, private and charter schools will continue. With the success of the state’s non-public system and the failing marks received by the public system, the issue has never been more pertinent.

School-finance reform remains, as educational experts Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick have argued, how to “equalize educational opportunities and give poor children a chance to achieve their dreams.”

Erik J. Chaput is a teaching associate in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.