he nation's highest court decided Monday that it will examine whether public funds may be used to purchase instructional materials, computer and other items for use in religious, sectarian schools. The justices agreed to review a 14-year old dispute from Louisiana which many legal observers say is at the heart of the question over public aid to parochial and other faith-based schools.

   The Clinton administration applauded the court's announcement, and hopes that part of an $15 billion educational bill, including the spending of nearly $800 million on computer and related technology programs, will reach religious schools. According to the U.S. department of Education, in the 1997-98 school year more than $12 million in government funds was used for instructional and related materials in private and sectarian schools in 34 states.

   At issue is the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which gives public schools money for special types of instructional materials. Public school districts are required to share any equipment a "secular, neutral and nonideological way" with private and sectarian schools in the district. In Louisiana, Jefferson Parish taxpayers sued government officials in 1985, though, saying that the program violated the First Amendment's establish clause ban on aid to religion.

   A federal judge upheld the aid program in 1997, but last August the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling.

   The high court's decision may affect related issues including the constitutionality of voucher programs which reimburse parents for tuition for their children when used at private and sectarian schools. Expected in the year 2000, the ruling could also clarifying a bewildering set of rulings and regulations over how far government may go -- and what sorts of resources may be paid for -- in helping students who attend private and religious schools. In 1997, for instance, the justices affirmed the constitutionality of allowing public school teachers to offer remedial help at parochial schools. That seemed to affirm a 1993 ruling that permitted school districts to pay for sign-language interpreters for deaf students in Catholic schools.

   Reporting on today's action, AP writer Richard Carelli observed, "Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have led the movement toward greater government accommodation of religion." Less yielding have been Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor have often been considered "swing votes" in the high courts First Amendment cases.

   Critics of government aid to parochial and other religious schools worry that recent high court rulings have blurred, even obliterated, early decisions from the 1970s. Attorneys representing Catholic school parents have argued that the Constitution "does not bar aid to the educational function of religiously affiliated schools," and attempt to distinguish between the strictly education activities of the daily class routine with periods of religious instruction. A policy of no government aid, they argue, "would require discrimination against, not neutrality toward, religion."

   Counter to this, though, are the arguments advanced by the taxpayers in the Louisiana suit. Their attorneys insist that the "discrimination, not neutrality" claim amounts to a '"flawed theory" since it would permit indiscriminate and unlimited funding of resources for religious schools -- everything from desks and textbooks to, under President Clinton's new initiative, computers and other high-technology programs. "If computers, why not desks, blackboards and copies? Where would the line be drawn?"

   The danger is that with the present split and coloration of the Supreme Court regarding establishment clause issues, a majority of justices may declare that the expenditure of government funds for computers or other equipment, when used by religious schools, has no direct effect on promoting religion, and thus passes constitutional muster.

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