Cathedral High School, an Indiana Catholic School, is receiving a lot of backlash after terminating a gay teacher. And the school received an estimate of $1 Million in public funding. The administration of the school admitted that they fired the teacher on grounds of his being gay. And they did so because Archdiocese of Indianapolis threatened to cut ties with them if they didn’t do so.
The Cathedral High School is private and religious but it runs on public money. And the public funding comes through the state’s voucher program. Indiana’s voucher program is an educational funding, called the Choice Scholarship Program.
And it provides low and middle income students with publicly funded scholarships. The school received $1,136,258 in the session 2018-2019, and a total of $3,457,075 in the last three years.
Even though the program helps students, it does not require schools to carry out discriminations. In fact it abhors such discrimination based on gender identity and sexuality.
Public schools as well as private schools both are prone to have discrimination rules. But many Public schools also have anti-discrimination rules. In a study done by Huffpost, it was found that 14% of the Private schools under the Voucher program explicitly discriminate against LGBTQ Staff and students.
The School explained their decision to fire the teacher. They explained in a letter that because the educator was in a public same-sex marriage the school had to fire him or cut ties with the Diocese. If that would have happened then the school would no longer be catholic and a non-profit organization.
Lately The Archdiocese of Indianapolis is on a firing spree. Just last week the Archdiocese threatened another school “Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory school” over the same issue. But the school decided to keep the teacher who is from the LGBTQ Community. But Brebeuf does not have much to lose by defying the archdiocese. It seems the school will keep its non-profit status.
