(The Daily Citizen) California’s attempt to close both public as well as private schools, including religious ones, during the COVID-19 pandemic generated a constitutional legal challenge by parents worried that their children’s education was suffering due to the lack of in-person education. As it turned out, the parents of private school students won a legal round at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, while the parents of public-school students lost.
In March 2020 Governor Newsom issued an executive order requiring people to stay in their homes, with few exceptions. That resulted in state public health officials mandating distance learning for both public and private schools for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year. As the months passed, California officials issued further public health orders outlining “tiers” of restrictions depending on the COVID-19 infection situation at any given time. Those orders effectively kept all public and private schools in the state closed to in-person learning that fall.