The statewide governing board overseeing charter schools has once again drawn the ire of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond over its handling of an application for a religious school.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Drummond went to court, this time accusing the Statewide Charter School Board of deliberately failing to perform a clear legal duty.
This same state governing board, which was blocked last year by the U.S. Supreme Court in its quest to facilitate the establishment of an openly religious Catholic charter school, has complied with that binding legal precedent by denying sponsorship and taxpayer funding for the proposed Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School.
But the Office of the Attorney General said the board’s formal notice of denial to the Florida-based applicant is insufficient because it relied solely on the online charter school application’s inclusion of religion.
It reportedly lacked any of the other 10 weaknesses and inadequacies cited since early February by state agency staff employed by the Statewide Charter School Board, as well as some members.
Drummond has gone to Oklahoma County District Court seeking a court order, called a writ of mandamus, to force the Statewide Charter School Board to send a formal notice of rejection to the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School applicant with all grounds for rejection, not just the constitutional issue of religion.
“This petition concerns only the Board’s refusal to discharge its independent statutory obligation to decline weak or inadequate charter applications, and its deliberate election to suppress from the record non-constitutional grounds for rejection that were fully developed, uncontested, and plainly supported by the evidence before the Board at its March 9, 2026 meeting,” states the new lawsuit. “To be clear, the Board’s refusal to list all of the reasons for rejecting the revised application is not coincidental. It is a deliberate decision designed to avoid issues of state law when Ben Gamla files a lawsuit ….”
Brian Shellem, an Edmond businessman and gubernatorial appointee who serves as the board’s chairman, has been unabashed in his vocal support for state sponsorship of openly religious schools, in general, and specifically for the Ben Gamla charter applicant in its anticipated legal challenge.
In February, he said he hoped the issue would return to the U.S. Supreme Court because the “lack of judicial consensus demands the need for legal clarity and precedent.”
Oklahoma state statute explicitly defines charter schools as public schools, and state statute and federal regulation specifically prohibit them from affiliation with a nonpublic sectarian school or religious institution.
But those issues faced legal challenge in a test case of the separation of church and state, with a proposal by the Catholic Church in Oklahoma for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the proposal for a religious charter school unconstitutional, halting its planned opening, and a divided U.S. Supreme Court voted 4-4, upholding that state court decision.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused, presumably over close, personal ties to a Notre Dame law professor involved in the St. Isidore proposal, which would have no bearing in a legal challenge by the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School applicant.
Among the other concerns with the application raised by the Statewide Charter School Board were the composition of the proposed school’s governing board, including not having at least one parent or grandparent of a would-be charter school student on the board, and serving far more than the 30-40 students the state was told to anticipate in the applicant’s letter of intent.
In January, Peter Deutsch, a former member of Congress and the founder of a nonprofit organization that backs Florida’s secular Ben Gamla Charter Schools, which have been operating for 19 years, appeared before the Statewide Charter School Board in Oklahoma City and said he expected around 30-40 students in the inaugural class of the proposed 9th-12th grade school, if approved.
When it was all said and done, the application was for a K-12 school, with a first-year enrollment goal of 400 students and Year 5 total enrollment of 1,150 students.
Drummond’s lawsuit claims the discrepancy goes “to the heart of the school’s demonstrated capacity, community demand, and fiscal viability” because state law requires charter school applicants to demonstrate both the educational need and financial viability of a proposed school.
In January, the Jewish Federations in the state’s two largest cities publicly called for the denial of Oklahoma state sanctioning of the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School, claiming proponents had left them in the dark and called the idea an insult to the community that would disregard all the work that’s gone into building a strong Jewish education in Oklahoma.
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