“The U.S. Supreme Court has reaffirmed this constitutional principle multiple times, most recently last year, and now, thankfully, so has this court,” Galus said. “Darren Patterson Christian Academy has been serving Chaffee County families for over 40 years. Yet Colorado officials tried to force it to abandon its religious beliefs — the reason why parents choose to send their kids to the school — to receive critical state funding. That is a violation of the school’s First Amendment rights.”
Domenico’s ruling allows the Darren Patterson Christian Academy to participate in the universal preschool program while its constitutional lawsuit is still pending but does not settle the lawsuit.
The Department of Early Childhood did not respond to a request for comment.
Darren Patterson Christian Academy filed its lawsuit against the Colorado Department of Early Childhood after the department refused to grant the school an exemption to the gender-related anti-discrimination rules listed in the Program Service Agreement. The agreement would have forced the school to comply with laws that prohibit discrimination based on one’s gender identity, which includes a prohibition on “deliberately misusing an individual’s preferred name, form of address, or gender-related pronoun.”
Although the department is not currently investigating any complaints against the school and has not formally told the school that the policies would be in violation, the ruling found that statements made by Gov. Jared Polis indicated that his administration would likely use the anti-discrimination rules against religious schools.
“If you run a preschool that doesn’t receive state money, you can run it the way you want,” Polis said in August, according to the court document. “But of course, when you are publicly funded, you have to agree with the basic values: We don’t discriminate, and you can’t say parents can’t come here because they are gay or they are not married or whatever it is.”