Dive Brief:
- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing his state’s higher education coordinating board to end three work-study programs, alleging they are “unconstitutional and discriminatory” against religious students.
- Under the rules established by the Texas Legislature, the programs require participating employers to provide students with nonsectarian work. Two of the programs also make students attending seminary or receiving religious instruction ineligible to participate.
- The lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that those provisions amount to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board “prohibiting participants from engaging in sectarian activities, including sectarian courses of study, to be eligible to receive state benefit.” He asked a state judge to bar the board from administering the programs.
Dive Insight:
Paxton argued in the lawsuit that the state work-study programs — all of which are need-based — exclude otherwise eligible students “based solely on the religious character of their course of study,” violating the First Amendment.
Texas is home to at least 14 seminary schools, according to The Association of Theological Schools.
The work-study programs also “effectively eliminate religious organizations with only sectarian employment opportunities from participating,” Paxton said.
The state board did not immediately respond to questions Monday.
The three programs being contested are:
- The Texas College Work-Study Program.
- The Texas Working Off-Campus: Reinforcing Knowledge and Skills Internship Program, better known as the TXWORKS internship.
- The Texas Innovative Adult Career Education, or ACE, Grant Program.
The work-study program and TXWORKS internship partially fund jobs for eligible students to help them pay for college. The ACE program provides grants to nonprofits “for use in job training, vocational education, and related workforce development” for eligible students, according to the lawsuit.
All the programs are geared toward low-income students, though some also target other demographic groups as well, such as ACE’s focus on veterans.
In a Friday statement, Paxton called the laws governing the programs “anti-Christian” and said they should “be completely wiped off the books.”
This is not the first time Paxton, who is running for U.S. Senate, has sought to overturn Texas state law through the courts. In June, he worked with the Trump administration to have a federal judge strike down Texas’ decades-old law offering in-state tuition rates to undocumented students.
Paxton’s lawsuit comes after a federal judge earlier this year struck down a Minnesota law that excluded some religious colleges from participating in a publicly funded dual enrollment program.
Minnesota’s dual enrollment program previously barred colleges from participating if they required students to sign faith statements. In August, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel ruled that the law infringed on the colleges’ constitutional rights by making them choose between participating in the program and practicing their religion.
