A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction request from a Florida-based organization seeking to open a Jewish online charter school in Oklahoma.
In an order issued Thursday, Judge David Russell with the Western District of Oklahoma granted a request from Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation to block the Statewide Charter School Board from denying the organization’s charter school application solely because of its intent to incorporate faith-based instruction.
“Because the non-sectarian provision in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act expressly discriminates against otherwise eligible recipients solely because of their religious character, it violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Russell wrote.
The organization sued Oklahoma Attorney Gentner Drummond and the Statewide Charter School Board after the board cited state law when it denied Ben Gamla’s application and appeal earlier this year to open an online charter school.
Oklahoma state statute explicitly defines charter schools as public schools, which specifically prohibits them from affiliation with a nonpublic sectarian school or religious institution.
Since 2007, Ben Gamla Schools founder Peter Deutsch has built a network of Hebrew-language charter schools across Florida. Their curriculum focuses on tenets of the Jewish faith, as well as Hebrew language, culture, and history.
In its initial rejection letter, the Statewide Charter School Board noted multiple deficiencies in Ben Gamla’s application, including the non-sectarian requirement in state law, discrepancies in the number of students it anticipated enrolling, governing board policies that would not be in compliance with Oklahoma’s Open Meeting Act, and only one Oklahoma resident listed on the proposed school’s governing board. State law requires that all members of a charter school’s board of directors live in Oklahoma.
Although several of those objections were addressed as part of a revised application submitted through an appeal process, board members voted again in March to reject the request.
The only justification given in its rejection letter was the state statute prohibiting religious affiliation and the legal precedent set by another faith-based organization’s attempt to open a charter school in Oklahoma.
The Statewide Charter School Board’s legal predecessor, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, voted in 2023 to authorize St. Isidore of Seville, an online religious charter school backed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa.
That decision ultimately went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which held in a 4-4 vote that the school was unconstitutional. St. Isidore never opened. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City announced in May that enrollment numbers were not sufficient to open a planned online tuition-based Catholic school, St. Carlo Acutis Academy, for the 2026-27 school year.
In a written statement, Deutsch called Thursday’s order “a victory for educational freedom.”
“The state cannot single out religious schools for exclusion while welcoming everyone else into the charter school program,” the statement read. “We’re eager to open wide the doors of educational opportunity in Oklahoma.”
Jewish organizations in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City had both previously said they were not consulted about the proposed school, with the Oklahoma City Jewish Federation publicly calling for the board to reject the application.
In Thursday’s order, Russell noted that although the Statewide Charter School Board is listed as a defendant, the primary legal opposition to Ben Gamla’s request is instead from two groups of Oklahoma residents intervening in the suit.
Morgan Bandy is an attorney with Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which is among the organizations representing seven of the intervenors. She reiterated Thursday afternoon that the litigation will continue but expressed concern about the temporary injunction’s potential impact.
“At the face of this, we’re facing a pathway to there potentially being public schools that are not secular and are not open to all students as they should be,” she said.
Drummond’s office provided a written statement Thursday afternoon in response to the federal court’s ruling.
“In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a religious charter school violates the Oklahoma Constitution, state law and the U.S. Constitution,” the statement read. “The U.S. Supreme Court left that decision in place last year.”
Thursday’s opinion is separate from a petition Drummond filed in Oklahoma County District Court in March, seeking a court order forcing the Statewide Charter School Board to send a formal rejection notice to Ben Gamla that lists out all the reasons its application was denied rather than simply the nonsectarian requirement.
As per court records, that request is still pending.
