FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, March 12, 1997

WASHINGTON -- Responding to the reintroduction of the Community Renewal Act, the American Civil Liberties Union today cautioned that hidden behind the legislation's laudatory goals are a series of radical policy initiatives that, if adopted, would drain some of the nation's poorest public schools of their funding.

The ACLU also said that the legislation would also force local and state governments to give tax dollars to churches, synagogues and other religious institutions to provide drug counseling and drug rehabilitation programs even if the programs are heavily religious in nature.

"Rather than solving the serious funding problems in the nations poorest school districts, the Community Renewal Act would exacerbate them by siphoning off tax dollars from the public schools to subsidize private, religious schools," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU's National Washington Office.

Murphy added that the community renewal bill is, in many ways, the codification of the Christian Coalition's agenda that was announced with great fanfare here in January. That agenda called for the removal of "obstacles" that currently keep religious organizations from receiving government funds.

"The obstacles that the sponsors of the Community Renewal Act would so easily brush aside are nothing less than Constitution," Murphy said. "We can understand why the Christian Coalition would be so eager to dismiss our laws and traditions to further its agenda, but we are dismayed that the legislations co-sponsors, all of them elected officials who swore to uphold the Constitution, are so willing to follow along."

Senators Spencer Abraham, R-Michigan, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, are the primary co-sponsors of the legislation in the Senate. In the House, the bill is being co-sponsored by Representatives J.C. Watts, R-Oklahoma; Floyd H. Flake, D-New York, and James Talent, R-Missouri.

One major section of the legislation would require all renewal communities to set up a school voucher scheme, deceptively titled "scholarships" in the legislation.

The ACLU has long criticized voucher schemes, saying that they would undermine public education and violate the Constitution's Establishment clause, which prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to fund sectarian institutions.

In fact, the ACLU said that many state constitutions -- including those of the home states of two of the bill's primary sponsors, Oklahoma and Missouri -- contain explicit prohibitions on the use of public funds for sectarian purposes.

The American public is also wary of voucher schemes. Polling shows that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to using money spent on public education to help parents pay for private or religious schools.

"Rather than renewing the inner cities," Murphy said, "the legislation introduced today would leave the vast majority of public school children with no hope and no opportunity."