Significance: This ruling established that separation of church and state must not interfere with equal rights and services for all citizens. This case required the Court to decide if the true meaning of the Establishment Clause was the narrow meaning, the broad meaning, or something else in between.
Background: The town of Ewing, New Jersey, had no school buses, so children had to ride city buses to get to school. The school board decided to reimburse all parents—even the parents of children who attended religious schools—for the cost of bus fare. One local resident, Arch Everson, sued the city, claiming that the parents of religious-school students should not be reimbursed because to do so would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Decision: This case was argued on November 20, 1946, and decided on February 10, 1947, by a vote of 5 to 4. Justice Hugo Black spoke for the Court, upholding the law that reimbursed all parents for the cost of transportation to all accredited schools, including religious schools. The Court ruled that public services should be granted on an equal basis to all citizens, regardless of religion. Justices Robert H. Jackson, Felix Frankfurter, Wiley Rutledge, and Harold Burton dissented. They agreed with the basic concept behind the ruling, but were not convinced that it applied in this case.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “. . . we cannot say that the First Amendment prohibits New Jersey from spending tax-raised funds to pay the bus fares of parochial [religious] school pupils as a part of a general program under which it pays the fares of pupils attending public and other schools. It is undoubtedly true that children are helped to get to church schools. There is even a possibility that some of the children might not be sent to the church schools if the parents were compelled to pay their children’s bus fares out of their own pockets when transportation to a public school would have been paid for by the State. . . . Similarly, parents might be reluctant to permit their children to attend schools which the state had cut off from such general government services as ordinary police and fire protection, connections for sewage disposal, public highways and sidewalks. Of course, cutting off church schools from these services so separate and so indisputably marked off from the religious function would make it far more difficult for the schools to operate. But such is obviously not the purpose of the First Amendment. That Amendment requires the state to be neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and nonbelievers; it does not require the state to be their adversary [opponent]. State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions than it is to favor them.”
