Supreme Court Weighs Denver Catholic Preschool Funding Dispute

Will the U.S. Supreme Court let Denver’s Catholic preschools keep their state funding, or will they be cut off for refusing to enroll children from LGBTQ+ families?

That is the question that landed on the justices’ docket this Tuesday. The Archdiocese of Denver, joined by St. Mary Catholic Parish and two other parish preschools, is asking the court to overturn a 10th Circuit ruling that sided with Colorado. The state says its universal preschool program is a public benefit, and public benefits cannot be handed out with a religious filter attached. The archdiocese says the opposite: that their admissions policy is rooted in religious teaching, and excluding them violates their free-exercise rights.

Let’s do the math on what’s actually at stake here. The state program was created by a 2020 ballot measure, and the archdiocese argues that letting their schools participate will create more seats for everyone. Nicholas Reaves, an attorney for the archdiocese and the two parish preschools, told the court that letting families use universal preschool funding at Catholic schools won’t take away a single seat from the over 2,000 preschools already participating in the program. “This is not a zero-sum game,” Reaves said.

On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, the issue isn’t about seat counts. It’s about who gets to define the terms of a public program. Colorado argues that if a school accepts state money, it has to comply with the state’s anti-discrimination law. That means admitting kids from same-sex families, regardless of what a parish believes about marriage. The archdiocese argues that forcing them to do so is an unconstitutional burden on their religion.

The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind the Catholic institutions, urging the court to overturn the lower court’s decision. Justice Elena Kagan pushed back hard on Tuesday, telling Justice Department attorney Sarah Harris that the administration seems to be arguing that children of same-sex marriage can be excluded because “exposing” them to other students “creates a problem.” Kagan noted that the court has a clear line from a landmark 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, which found that religious practices don’t create exemptions from laws that otherwise apply broadly. That decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia in a case over the spiritual use of peyote, has long been a target of the conservative legal movement.

Harris responded that the court currently has “a mess.” The justices have sided with religious schools in similar disputes before, ruling that they can’t be excluded from public aid programs in Maine and Montana. But in 2025, the court deadlocked over a plan to establish a publicly funded Catholic charter school after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself. So the precedent is messy, and the stakes are high for anyone relying on state-funded preschool in Colorado.

For context, this isn’t just a legal technicality for folks around here. If the Supreme Court sides with the archdiocese, it could further narrow that 1990 Smith decision. That means religious institutions might be able to opt out of broader anti-discrimination requirements whenever they claim a conflict with their faith. If the court sides with Colorado, it reaffirms that public money comes with public rules.

The practical bottom line for neighbors in the valley and across the state is simple: your property taxes help fund this program. If you pay for universal preschool, you should be able to send your child to any participating school without the state having to pick a winner in a religious dispute. The court will decide whether that’s true, or whether faith gets to be the tiebreaker.