CONCORD, N.H. — The New Hampshire Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of a 10-year-old home-schooled New Hampshire girl ordered into a government-run school. On Sept. 17, a lower court judge refused to reconsider or stay the order.  An Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney represents the mother of the girl.

“Courts can settle disputes, but they cannot legitimately order a child into a government-run school on the basis that her religious views need to be mixed with other views. That’s precisely what the lower court admitted it is doing in this case, and that’s where our concern lies,” said ADF-allied attorney John Anthony Simmons of Hampton.

“The court illegitimately altered a method of education that the court itself stated is working. It admitted the girl is ‘well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising, and intellectually at or superior to grade level,’ but then it ordered her out of the home schooling she loves so that her religious views will be challenged at a government school. That’s where the court went too far,” Simmons explained.

Simmons filed a motion to reconsider and stay the order on Aug. 24. In her denial of the motions, Judge Lucinda V. Sadler of the Family Division of the Judicial Court for Belknap County in Laconia wrote that the girl “is at an age when it can be expected that she would benefit from the social interaction and problem solving she will find in public school, and granting a stay would result in a lost opportunity for her.”

“We are concerned anytime a court oversteps its bounds to tread on the right of a parent to make sound educational choices, or to discredit the inherent value of the home schooling option,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson. “The lower court effectively determined that it would be a ‘lost opportunity’ if a child’s Christian views are not sifted and challenged in a public school setting.  We regard that as a dangerous precedent.”

In the original order issued July 14 in the case, In the Matter of Kurowski and Kurowski (Voydatch), the court reasoned that the girl’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view” and then ordered her to be enrolled in a government school instead of being home-schooled.

ADF is a legal alliance of Christian attorneys and like-minded organizations defending the right of people to freely live out their faith. Launched in 1994, ADF employs a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.