For decades, California barred religious schools from a specialized government contract that lets public school districts place children with disabilities in private schools built to serve their unique needs. A federal court finally called that policy what it was: unconstitutional. Now Sacramento has answered with SB 685, a bill that claims to open the door to religious schools while quietly building a wall just inside it.
SB 685, authored by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) and sponsored by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, cleared the Assembly Education Committee on July 1 and now heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. The bill started out in 2025 as an unrelated measure providing financial aid to homeless CSU students, before being rewritten entirely to become the nonpublic schools bill described below. California Family Council opposes it.
CFC Vice President Greg Burt said the bill trades one constitutional violation for another. “Sacramento says religious schools can finally come through the door, but only if they stop being religious once they’re inside,” Burt said. “The Supreme Court already ruled that states can’t force a school to choose between its faith and a public benefit. SB 685 makes that exact choice. It’s not an invitation. It’s a trap, and it sets California up for a lawsuit it will lose.”
Why the bill exists
SB 685 is Sacramento’s response to Loffman v. California Department of Education, a lawsuit brought by Orthodox Jewish families and Jewish day schools over the state’s rule that “nonpublic schools,” the private schools districts contract with when they cannot meet a disabled child’s needs in-house, had to be strictly nonsectarian. In October 2024, the Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the families’ free exercise and equal protection claims, applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022). The families settled with the state in May 2025, and California agreed to stop enforcing the nonsectarian requirement. SB 685 is the Legislature’s attempt to rewrite the statute books to match.
The bait
On its face, SB 685 does what the courts demanded. It strikes the word “nonsectarian” from more than fifty places in the Education Code, technically allowing a Christian, Jewish, or other faith-based school to apply for certification as a nonpublic school for the first time in California history.
The switch
Read past the headline, and the bill quietly rebuilds the wall the courts tore down. Any religious school seeking certification must certify, under penalty of perjury, that every educational service it provides is “secular, neutral, and respectful regarding religion and religious views.” A school cannot open in prayer, teach children they are made in the image of God, or weave Scripture into a single lesson and still sign that oath honestly.
The bill separately bars any “religious instruction” for a disabled student placed by a public district, defines that term broadly, and requires the Department of Education to confirm the school is delivering the same instruction mandated for public school students, including the California Healthy Youth Act, the state’s comprehensive sex-education curriculum. It further bars contracted religious schools from any policy that could be called discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a provision that would strip a Christian school of its ability to hold staff and students to a biblical standard of conduct.
Two Constitutions, One Bill, No Solution
Sacramento is not only answering to the Ninth Circuit. Article IX, Section 8 of the California Constitution separately bars the state from ever appropriating public money “for the support of any sectarian or denominational school.” Lawmakers believe that clause forces them to keep every dollar of public money out of religious instruction, and SB 685’s secular certification oath is their attempt to satisfy it: let religious schools in the door, but only if they swear, under penalty of perjury, that nothing they do under the contract is actually religious.
That attempted fix runs headlong into Carson v. Makin, where the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Maine’s rule that a religious school receiving tuition funds could provide only “nonsectarian” instruction. The majority held that once a state opens a public benefit to general use, it cannot close that benefit off to a school for no reason other than its religious character. SB 685’s secular oath tries to accomplish by contract what the Court already forbade by category. It does not ask whether a school is religious. It asks the school to stop acting like one.
Who pays the price
The families caught in the middle are parents of children with disabilities, among the most vulnerable families in California’s education system and often the ones with the fewest placement options to begin with. A family that chooses a faith-based school because of its values now faces a choice state law should never force on anyone: their child’s specialized services, or their family’s convictions.
To be fair, not everything in SB 685 is objectionable on its own terms. New fingerprinting, background-check, and credentialing requirements for nonpublic school staff, phased in through January 2028, address real gaps in how California tracks employees at these schools, especially those located out of state. But those child-safety provisions arrive bundled with the ideological conditions above, and lawmakers should not be allowed to hide a secular loyalty oath behind a background-check bill.
What’s next
SB 685 now awaits a hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. CFC is urging Assembly members to grapple with the Carson problem before they vote, coordinating with Pacific Justice Institute, which has already filed formal opposition, and encouraging pastors and parents in committee members’ districts to weigh in directly. Californians who want to reach their Assembly member can find contact information at https://watchdog.californiafamily.org/public/find.
