> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theredlighthouse.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Everyone Will Call This the Homeschool Bible Case. Read What the Ninth Circuit Actually Held: Your Kitchen Table Is a Public School. - URL: https://www.theredlighthouse.org/advocate-woolard-kitchen-table/ - Published: 2026-08-25T13:28:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-25T13:28:55.000Z - Description: Three California families asked the Supreme Court last week to look at Woolard v. Thurmond. The Ninth Circuit did not hold that religious curriculum is dangerous. It held that a kitchen table is sufficiently public. - Author: The Red Lighthouse - Tags: The Advocate, News Stories Strip the case to its principle and it is not about a Bible at all. California pays for a lot of homeschooling. Families enroll in charter school independent study programs, the state sends money, the parents pick the books, the parents teach the lessons, the parents grade the work, and a charter school checks that the material meets state academic standards. Tens of thousands of children learn this way. Three families say their charter schools rejected their materials for one reason. According to the petition now in front of the Supreme Court, the schools turned down works by William Penn and Jonathan Edwards because of their "religious content." One school, the petition says, refused a grammar exercise built on the sentence "God sends the rain to help plants grow," because it "can't accept any work sample with any religious wording on it." That is the version of the story built to make you angry, and every word of it is in the filing. Here is the harder version. The Ninth Circuit did not rule that religious material is dangerous, or that Jonathan Edwards is contraband. It ruled on a definition. And the definition is the part that should worry you. ## What the court actually held John and Breanna Woolard, Hector and Diana Gonzales, and Carrie Dodson sued in October 2023 in the Eastern District of California. The defendants include Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, along with officials of Blue Ridge Academy and Visions in Education, the two charter schools overseeing the families' programs. They lost in the district court. On September 11, 2025, a unanimous Ninth Circuit panel affirmed. Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote it. Judges Eric Miller and Jennifer Sung joined. The reasoning went like this. California charter schools are public schools. Article IX, section 8 of the state constitution forbids public money for sectarian instruction. Education Code section 47605(e)(1) requires a charter school to be nonsectarian in its programs. The Supreme Court held in *Carson v. Makin* in 2022 that the Free Exercise Clause does not stop a state from providing "a strictly secular education in its public schools." Therefore the state may keep religious content out of these programs. The families answered that their programs are not public education in any real sense. The parent chooses the curriculum, the parent teaches, the parent grades. Functionally this is private homeschooling that the state helps pay for, and *Carson* said a state that funds education outside its own schools cannot then exclude the religious option. Hurwitz took the families' description of their own programs as true and ruled against them anyway. > Plaintiffs have alleged, and we take as true, that the defendant charter schools provide parents great flexibility to choose which pre-existing curricula to use to educate their children, or to create their own. But with that flexibility comes substantial legal constraints not applicable to private schools. ... The extensive legal requirements applicable to the defendant charter schools' independent study programs make the programs sufficiently public to defeat Plaintiffs' free exercise claim. Read that again. The dining room did not become less of a dining room. It became, for constitutional purposes, sufficiently public. The full Ninth Circuit declined to rehear the case. First Liberty Institute says five judges dissented from that denial, which is its account and not something the order itself is quoted as saying. ## The concession worth making The state has a real argument here, and pretending otherwise is how people lose cases they should win. California did not invent the rule to spite Christians. Article IX, section 8 is older than every party to this suit. A state genuinely may run secular public schools, and *Carson* says so in as many words. If public dollars flow through a program the state fully controls, the state's interest in what it funds is not fake. Hurwitz is not a crank, and his opinion is not a sneer. The question is whether control that thin can carry a definition that heavy. ## Why the definition should worry you even if you never homeschool Grant the Ninth Circuit its logic and see where it goes. A benefit becomes a public program. Participation in the program makes your activity public. Once your activity is public, the state's rules about its own speech apply to you, in your house, at your table, over your child's grammar worksheet. The mechanism is not hostility to religion. It is reclassification. Nobody has to say a word against your faith. They only have to say that what you are doing is really theirs. That mechanism does not stay put, and it does not stay pointed in one direction. The state that can define a homeschool as a public school in order to strip Jonathan Edwards out of it can define other private things as public when the money touches them. Vouchers, tax credited scholarships, disability services, tutoring grants. A conservative should be able to see the danger in that. So should a progressive, the first time it lands on something they care about. The liberty worth having is the one that holds when the classification is turned around. ## What happens next, honestly Nothing, probably. The Court denies the overwhelming majority of petitions, and *Woolard v. Thurmond* may die in a list of one line orders with no explanation at all. The conferences resume September 28\. The term opens October 5\. A signal could come this fall. One reason to watch anyway: on November 3 the Court hears *St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy*, the Colorado universal preschool case, which asks a neighboring question about religious providers and public benefit programs. We wrote about the second question presented in that case on August 13\. How the justices talk in November will tell you a great deal about whether they think a kitchen table can be reclassified in September. Watch the definition, not the Bible. The definition is where the case is. --- If this was useful, send it to the person who will argue with you about it. That is what this one is for. The Red Lighthouse is paid for by members. If you want more of this, you know where the button is. --- ### Sources - [The Christian Post, "Parents ask Supreme Court to hear case on Calif. religious education ban," Michael Gryboski, August 24, 2026](https://www.christianpost.com/news/parents-ask-scotus-to-end-california-ban-on-religious-education.html?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Washington Examiner, "California parents ask Supreme Court to intervene in homeschooling religious discrimination case," Jack Birle, August 21, 2026](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/supreme-court/4694694/california-parents-ask-supreme-court-to-intervene-in-homeschooling-religious-discrimination-case/?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Petition for a writ of certiorari, Woolard v. Thurmond (primary document)](https://firstliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Woolard-v.-Thurmond-Cert-Petition%5FRedacted.pdf?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Woolard v. Thurmond, Ninth Circuit panel opinion, September 11, 2025 (primary document)](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/24-4291/24-4291-2025-09-11.html?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [Complaint as filed, Eastern District of California, October 2023 (primary document)](https://firstliberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CA-Charters-Complaint%5FRedacted.pdf?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - [First Liberty Institute statement on the filing](https://firstliberty.org/media/california-parents-ask-supreme-court-to-hear-religious-discrimination-case/?ref=theredlighthouse.org)