Supreme Court Will Hear St. Mary v. Roy: A Colorado Preschool Case With Everything to Do With Your Child’s IEP

An analytical preview of St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado v. Roy, No. 25-581 — the free-exercise challenge to Colorado’s Universal Preschool program that the Supreme Court will argue on November 3, 2026, and why its treatment of the program’s Individualized Education Program preference matters to every special-education parent in Massachusetts.

Introduction

On Tuesday, November 3, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral argument in a case whose caption mentions no disability, no IEP, and no special-education law at all. The case is St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado, et al. v. Lisa Roy, in her official capacity as Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, et al., No. 25-581. At its surface, it is a religious-liberty dispute about whether Colorado may require Catholic preschools that take part in the state’s publicly funded Universal Preschool (UPK) program to admit all children, including LGBTQ children and children of LGBTQ parents. The petitioners — two Catholic parishes and a Catholic family — say the requirement unconstitutionally forces them to choose between their faith and participation in a state benefit. Colorado says the requirement is an ordinary, neutral condition on public money.

But buried in the middle of this dispute is a provision that special-education parents should understand better than anyone: Colorado’s UPK regulations allow participating preschools to reserve seats for children who have an Individualized Education Program (IEP) under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The petitioners’ central argument is that this preference — together with others Colorado permits, such as a Head Start income preference and a broadly worded “specific community” preference — proves that Colorado’s nondiscrimination rule is not “generally applicable,” and that therefore any burden the rule places on religious exercise must survive strict judicial scrutiny. In other words, the disability accommodation itself is the legal ammunition. If the Supreme Court accepts the petitioners’ framing, the constitutional status of accommodations for children with disabilities would be placed directly in the crossfire.

That is why the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and twelve other disability and civil-rights organizations filed a merits brief in this case on August 24, 2026 — on Colorado’s side. Their brief, analyzed at length below, argues that the IEP preference is not an “exemption” from Colorado’s nondiscrimination rule at all, but rather a fulfillment of it: an implementation of the affirmative duty that federal disability law has imposed on American schools for fifty years. The brief’s deepest worry is easy to state. A Supreme Court opinion that treats IDEA-mandated accommodations as suspect deviations from equal treatment — deviations that trigger strict scrutiny whenever a religious provider objects to them — would hand every provider that objects to serving children with disabilities a constitutional argument against doing so.

The stakes reach well beyond Colorado. Sixteen states plus the District of Columbia now fund universal or near-universal pre-kindergarten through mixed-delivery systems that include private providers, according to figures cited in the petitioners’ own briefing from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). State-funded preschool enrollment reached an all-time high of more than 1.75 million children in 2023-24. Massachusetts is not currently among the universal-pre-K states, but the architecture at issue in St. Mary — public money flowing to private providers, attached to nondiscrimination conditions and disability-access preferences — is the same architecture any future Massachusetts expansion would use. And Massachusetts has already taken a position: it joined a multistate amicus brief supporting Colorado, filed August 24, 2026.

This article is a preview, not a report of an outcome. As of this writing — September 18, 2026 — the case is fully briefed, more than thirty amicus briefs have been filed on each side at the merits stage, the United States has intervened on the petitioners’ side and asked to share oral-argument time, and the Court has scheduled argument for November 3, 2026. No decision is expected before spring 2027. What follows is a methodical walk through the program Colorado built, the litigation history below, the precise questions the Court has agreed to answer (and the one it declined), the circuit split the case will test, the disability community’s intervention, and the concrete stakes — constitutional and practical — for parents of children with IEPs in Massachusetts and nationwide.

Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program and Its Equal-Opportunity Mandate

Understanding St. Mary v. Roy requires understanding, first, what Colorado built. Universal Preschool (UPK) is not a voucher program in the classic sense, and it is not a town-tuitioning arrangement like the Maine and Vermont programs that produced earlier Supreme Court rulings on religious schools. It is a state-run, state-funded, mixed-delivery pre-kindergarten system in which public school districts, private centers, family child-care homes, and faith-based providers all participate as vendors of a single public program.

The Program’s Design: Free Preschool for Every Four-Year-Old

The program’s statutory spine is the UPK Act, codified at Colo. Rev. Stat. §§ 26.5-4-201 et seq., enacted through House Bill 22-1295 by the Colorado General Assembly in 2022. The legislation implemented a commitment Colorado voters had made at the ballot in 2020, when they approved a proposition providing state funding for universal preschool and imposed a modest tax increase to pay for it. First funding began with the 2023-24 school year.

The core promise is simple: every Colorado four-year-old is entitled to receive at least fifteen hours per week of preschool during the year before kindergarten, free of charge, “regardless of their economic circumstances.” Delivery is deliberately mixed. Families do not receive a voucher to spend wherever they wish; instead, they rank up to five preschool providers on a state portal, and the Colorado Department of Early Childhood (CDEC) runs an algorithmic matching process that assigns children to providers across the entire statewide network. Colorado’s respondents’ brief, filed August 17, 2026, describes a network of nearly 2,000 UPK preschools statewide.

Faith-based providers participate. Petitioners and respondents agree on the baseline figure: as of October 2023, forty faith-based providers took part in UPK, and 904 children were matched with them in the program’s first year. Participating religious preschools remain free to teach religion — the program does not censor their curriculum, require them to secularize, or reach into their non-UPK programming. What UPK asks in return is stated in the statute’s equal-opportunity mandate, and it is that mandate — a single sentence — that has generated four years of litigation.

The Equal-Opportunity Mandate

Colo. Rev. Stat. § 26.5-4-205(2)(b) requires every participating provider to “provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability.” The implementing regulations, 8 Colo. Code Regs. § 1404-1, carry the same rule forward. Providers that accept UPK-funded children therefore may not turn families away because the family is LGBTQ, because the child has a disability, because the family lacks housing, or for any of the other enumerated reasons.

Two features of the mandate deserve emphasis for a special-education readership. First, disability is on the list of protected statuses — a child with an IEP cannot be refused UPK enrollment because of the disability. Second, the mandate protects religious affiliation in the other direction as well: a participating secular provider may not refuse a Catholic child. The mandate is symmetrical on its face. The litigation is about whether its application to providers who object, on religious grounds, to serving certain families is constitutionally different from its application to everyone else.

The Exemptions Catalog: Where the Dispute Begins

Colorado’s rules do contain several preferences and adjustments — and the petitioners’ legal theory lives entirely inside them. The petitioners’ opening merits brief, filed June 25, 2026, catalogs the following:

The IEP preference. Under 8 CCR 1404-1 § 4.109(A)(3), providers may reserve seats for children “with an Individualized Education Program (IEP).” Critically, the regulation states its own purpose: the preference exists “to ensure conformity with obligations incurred pursuant to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.” This is the provision that has drawn the most attention from disability advocates, for reasons explained at length below.
The Head Start income preference. Providers operating as Head Start programs may prioritize low-income families — a federal-program alignment that petitioners call an income-based “discrimination” exemption.
The “specific community” preference. Section 4.109(A)(9) allows a provider to seek a preference for a child “being a part of a specific community.” Colorado’s CDEC approved seventeen such programmatic-preference requests in UPK’s inaugural year, and, per the respondents’ brief, more than 1,000 preschools have used the algorithmic matching adjustments, “available to both secular and religious preschools on the same basis.”
Quality-standard flexibility. Section 26.5-4-205(1)(b)(II) permits CDEC to “allow a preschool provider that does not meet the quality standards to participate … for a limited time while working toward compliance” — discretionary statutory language the petitioners characterize as unfettered agency discretion.
The former “congregation” exemption. In the program’s first year, faith-based providers could limit enrollment to members of their own congregation. The district court found this exemption violated the equal-opportunity mandate itself, and CDEC removed it by rulemaking during the appeal — an episode the petitioners cite as proof that Colorado polices religious accommodations far more aggressively than secular preferences, and that Colorado cites as proof that its rules apply to everyone.

The petitioners’ theory, in compressed form: if Colorado will exempt or permit income preferences, disability preferences, “community” preferences, and substandard quality, but will not exempt a Catholic preschool from admitting LGBTQ families, then the state is not applying its rule evenhandedly — it is choosing which forms of exclusion to tolerate, and religion is on the losing list. Under the Supreme Court’s modern free-exercise doctrine, that pattern, if proven, would mean the rule is not “generally applicable” and must satisfy strict scrutiny — a standard Colorado’s rule would fail, in the petitioners’ view. Colorado’s answer, also developed below, is that none of these provisions are exemptions from the nondiscrimination rule at all, that no one in Colorado government has authority to grant exceptions to it, and that the IEP preference in particular is a federal-law compliance obligation, not a favor the state dispenses.

The Parties and the Record Below

The District Court: A Bench Trial and a Defense Verdict

The litigation began on August 18, 2023, when St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton and its preschool program, St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood, and parents Daniel and Lisa Sheley sued Colorado officials in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, No. 1:23-cv-02079-JLK, seeking to block the equal-opportunity mandate before UPK’s first school year. The court declined to enter a preliminary injunction and instead set the case for trial. After a three-day bench trial in early January 2024, with ten witnesses, the district court entered Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order for Entry of Judgment for Colorado on June 4, 2024, in an opinion reported at 736 F. Supp. 3d 956.

The district court held that the sexual-orientation and gender-identity components of the equal-opportunity requirement were “neutral and generally applicable” under Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990) — the 1990 decision holding that neutral, generally applicable laws that incidentally burden religious exercise do not trigger strict scrutiny. In the alternative, the court found that even if strict scrutiny applied, Colorado’s interest in nondiscriminatory access to a public preschool program satisfied it. The court also dismissed the Archdiocese of Denver for lack of associational standing — a dismissal that continues to generate briefing disputes about whether the Archdiocese is “properly a party before this Court,” as Colorado’s brief puts it. The petitioners respond that the Tenth Circuit found resolving the standing question unnecessary; the scope of the Archdiocese’s presence in the case remains one of the quieter open questions headed into argument.

The trial record produced the findings both sides have carried into every subsequent brief. Most contentious is the testimony of Dawn Odean, Director of Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program. Questioned at trial about the “specific community” preference, Odean offered hypotheticals in which the preference could support a preschool admitting only “gender-nonconforming children,” prioritizing “children of color from historically underserved areas,” or serving “the LGBTQ community,” and she interpreted the mandate as permitting prioritization of “families who have historically been discriminated against” — while testifying she was “unaware” that Catholics have historically faced discrimination (App.353-355, 363). The petitioners treat this as a confession of discretionary, unequal exemptions. Colorado’s brief counters that Odean was merely answering counsel’s hypotheticals, that she “repeatedly disclaimed” any authority to waive the nondiscrimination mandate (JA347-49), and that the district court expressly found CDEC has no exception-granting authority. Both readings of the same testimony are now woven through the merits briefing; which reading a majority of the Court adopts may effectively decide the general-applicability question.

The trial record also contains the district court’s finding that cuts against the petitioners’ framing of who gets hurt: “For LGBTQ+ parents in rural environments, sometimes the only option available for early childhood education is a religious provider” (Pet.App.91a). In a mixed-delivery statewide program, in other words, a participating provider’s refusal to serve a family is not a private choice the family can simply shop around — it can foreclose the only publicly funded option within reach.

The Tenth Circuit’s Unanimous Affirmance

On September 30, 2025, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed, No. 24-1267, in an opinion reported at 154 F.4th 752. The panel held that Colorado’s mandate did not exclude religious schools “on the explicit basis that they were religious and not secular”; other religious schools were welcome in UPK, and the burden on the petitioners’ religious exercise was only “infringed incidentally” by a neutral rule. Smith, not strict scrutiny, therefore governed.

The panel also addressed the exemptions catalog directly, holding that the IEP and Head Start preferences “are not exceptions to the nondiscrimination requirement” (Pet.App.38a) — an analysis the disability amici have since built upon. And the panel chose a phrase that both sides have quoted ever since: Colorado’s UPK program is “a model example of maintaining neutral and generally applicable nondiscrimination laws while nonetheless trying to accommodate the exercise of religious beliefs” (App.42a). For Colorado, that is the point of the case. For the petitioners, the “model example” language is exactly the problem — a template any state can copy to condition public benefits in ways that religious providers cannot accept, confident that courts will call the result “neutral.”## The Questions Presented — and the One the Court Declined

The Petition’s Three Questions

When the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty — counsel of record for the petitioners, with Mark L. Rienzi and Eric C. Rassbach leading the team — filed the petition for a writ of certiorari on November 13, 2025, it framed three questions:

Whether proving a lack of general applicability under Employment Division v. Smith requires showing unfettered discretion or categorical exemptions for identical secular conduct.
Whether Carson v. Makin displaces the rule of Employment Division v. Smith only when the government explicitly excludes religious people and institutions.
Whether Employment Division v. Smith should be overruled.

On April 20, 2026, the Court granted the petition — but only as to Questions 1 and 2. Question 3, the direct request to overrule Smith, was denied. The distinction matters. The petitioners (and many Court watchers) have long hoped the Court would revisit Smith itself, which a substantial bloc of Justices has criticized; Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, has called Smith “fundamentally wrong,” and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, concurring in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021), wrote that it is “hard to see why the Free Exercise Clause — which protects in addition to the free exercise of religion — offers nothing more than protection from discrimination” in the face of exceptions-riddled laws. The Court declined to take up that project in this case. Whatever the November 3 argument produces, it will be decided within the Smith/Fulton/Carson framework, not by rewriting it — though the Solicitor General, as discussed below, has proposed pushing the framework further than the granted questions reach.

Colorado’s respondents’ brief, filed August 17, 2026, reformulated the questions to expose how much rides on framing. Colorado would have the Court decide:

Whether Carson v. Makin requires the application of strict scrutiny to neutral and generally applicable conditions on public benefits that incidentally burden religious exercise.
Whether a state’s decision to allow publicly funded preschools to provide specialized services for disabled children and children from low-income families requires the state, as a constitutional matter, to allow religious preschools participating in that same program to exclude children based on their parents’ (or their own) protected-class status.
Whether the Free Exercise Clause requires strict scrutiny of a state program’s statutory equal-opportunity requirements when the program allows no exceptions to those requirements, authorizes no one to grant exceptions to those requirements, and allows no secular conduct that undermines the state’s equal-opportunity interests.

The reformulation is a rhetorical weapon aimed at QP-1. Notice Colorado’s second reformulated question: it names the disability preference explicitly and asks whether serving disabled children — as federal law requires — somehow obligates a state to fund exclusion of other protected classes. That is the disability community’s question, asked by the state defending the program. Whether the Court answers the petitioners’ version or Colorado’s version of QP-1 will largely determine whether the IEP preference ends up characterized as an unconstitutional asymmetry or as a lawful implementation of federal disability law.

The Solicitor General’s Cert-Stage Position

The federal government entered the case before certiorari was granted — an unusual move that drew its own commentary (Amy Howe, SCOTUSblog, April 16, 2026, asked “Why does the government keep showing up at the Supreme Court uninvited?”). On January 30, 2026, the Solicitor General filed an unsolicited amicus brief supporting the petitioners, arguing that the general-applicability question should be resolved in their favor. The brief also offered a strategic observation about Question 3, noting that “resolving the question presented as to general applicability could obviate any need to resolve at this juncture whether Smith itself retains vitality, as petitioners urge in their third question presented” (quoted via John Elwood, Relist Watch, SCOTUSblog, April 15, 2026, citing the brief at p. 30).

The cert-stage amicus is often credited with helping the petition survive relisting (the case was relisted once, after the April 2 conference, before the April 20 grant). The Court granted exactly the questions the SG’s strategy recommended — general applicability and the Carson narrowing line — while passing on overruling Smith. As of September 17, 2026, the docket snapshot reviewed for this article shows no ruling on the SG’s August 31 motion for divided argument; whether the Solicitor General will share the podium on November 3 remains formally open, though such motions are usually granted.

The Circuit Split: How the Courts Divide on General Applicability

The Fulton/Tandon Majority Rule

Under Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021), and Tandon v. Newsom, 593 U.S. 61 (2021), a law is not generally applicable — and therefore triggers strict scrutiny — if the government makes secular exemptions from it that burden a competing interest to a comparable degree. The operative question under the majority rule is comparative: what else does the state allow, and do those allowances serve the same interests the rule serves?

Seven courts have adopted the robust comparative approach, treating any secular exemption or discretionary mechanism as potential evidence that a rule is not generally applicable:

Ninth Circuit — Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District, 82 F.4th 664 (9th Cir. 2023) (en banc), and Bates v. Pakseresht, 146 F.4th 772 (9th Cir. 2025) (upholding Oregon’s exclusion of religious providers from publicly funded early-learning programs — a program strikingly similar to UPK).
Third Circuit — Blackhawk v. Pennsylvania, 381 F.3d 202 (3d Cir. 2004); Fraternity of Police, Newark Lodge No. 12 v. City of Newark, 170 F.3d 359 (3d Cir. 1999) (the classic case: a grooming rule that exempted security officers but not Muslim officers was not generally applicable); Smith v. Atlantic City, 138 F.4th 759 (3d Cir. 2025).
Sixth Circuit — Monclova Christian Academy v. Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, 984 F.3d 477 (6th Cir. 2020).
Eleventh Circuit — Midrash Sephardi, Inc. v. Surfside, 366 F.3d 1214 (11th Cir. 2004).
State supreme courts — Louisiana (Spell v. McHugh), Iowa (Mitchell County v. Zimmerman), and Hawaii (Armitage v. Walgreens), applying the comparative test as a matter of both federal and state constitutional law.

The Tenth Circuit’s Unfettered-Discretion Minority Rule

The Tenth Circuit in St. Mary took the narrower path. On its reading, a rule fails general applicability only if the government exercises “unfettered discretion” to grant exemptions, or exempts identical secular conduct while burdening religious conduct. Because Colorado’s statute, as interpreted by the state’s highest-court-adjacent officials, contains no exception authority for the nondiscrimination mandate — and because the IEP and Head Start preferences concern different conduct than the mandate’s protected-class refusals — the mandate was generally applicable. Three other courts follow this approach: the Second Circuit (Emilee Carpenter v. James, 107 F.4th 92 (2d Cir. 2024); Miller v. McDonald, 130 F.4th 258 (2d Cir. 2025)), the Connecticut Supreme Court (Spillane v. Lamont, 323 A.3d 1007 (Conn. 2024)), and the California Supreme Court (North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group v. San Diego County, 189 P.3d 959 (Cal. 2008)).

Three Justices have already characterized this division as “widespread, entrenched, and worth addressing” — Justice Thomas, writing in dissent from denial of certiorari in Dr. A v. Hochul, 142 S. Ct. 2569, 2570 (2022), joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch. That statement, from the same three Justices now most skeptical of Smith, is the strongest public signal that the Court granted QP-1 precisely to resolve the split. Colorado disputes that a true split exists at all, arguing that the Tenth Circuit’s ruling rested on state statutory interpretation — no exceptions exist under Colorado law as a matter of state law — rather than on a contestable reading of federal doctrine. The petitioners’ reply brief, filed September 16, 2026, disputes that characterization. The count itself — seven courts to four — comes from the petitioners’ briefing and has not been independently verified beyond the parties’ representations.

The practical difference between the two rules is enormous, and it is not academic for special-education families. Under the majority rule, a state that grants any secular accommodation — including the IDEA-mandated IEP preference — opens its entire regulatory scheme to comparative strict-scrutiny analysis. Under the minority rule, only express discretion to waive the rule triggers heightened review. Every disability accommodation in every state-funded program sits on one side or other of that divide.

Carson v. Makin and the Narrowing Line

What Carson Decided — and What It Didn’t

The second granted question tests how far Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. 767 (2022), extends. Carson held that Maine’s town-tuitioning program could not exclude schools “solely because they are religious” — that excluding a use (religious instruction), rather than merely a status, was still discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause after Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017). Read most broadly, Carson suggests that once a state funds private educational providers, any exclusion of religious providers — including exclusions justified by the providers’ religiously motivated conduct — is suspect.

Read narrowly, Carson governs only exclusions that target religious character explicitly. That is the Tenth Circuit’s reading, and the reading of a developing line of post-Carson lower-court decisions:

Youth 71Five Ministries v. Williams, 153 F.4th 704 (9th Cir. 2025) — a state grant program could defund a ministry over its statement of faith because the defunding rule was not “exclusive to religious organizations.”
Kim v. Board of Education of Howard County, 93 F.4th 733 (4th Cir. 2024) — the Carson line covers only exclusions “solely because of their religious character.”
The Tenth Circuit’s decision below — Colorado’s mandate “did not exclude religious schools on the explicit basis that they were religious and not secular.”

The petitioners’ reply is that this “explicit basis” test renders Carson nearly meaningless: a government wishing to defund religious ministries need only draft its exclusion as a facially neutral nondiscrimination condition, and Carson is evaded. The petitioners point to Maine — the very state Carson ruled against — as proof that the template works. After Carson was decided but while its progeny were pending, Maine amended its town-tuitioning program to exclude schools that “discriminate” on the basis of “sexual orientation or gender identity.” In St. Dominic Academy v. Makin, 744 F. Supp. 3d 43 (D. Me. 2024), and Crosspoint Church v. Makin, 719 F. Supp. 3d 99 (D. Me. 2024), the District of Maine treated those exclusions as governed by Smith rather than Carson and upheld them. Maine, in other words, has already re-carved the carve-out Carson struck down — in the very program Carson decided. A parallel case, Mid-Vermont Christian School v. Saunders, D. Vt. No. 2:23-cv-652 (order denying preliminary injunction May 12, 2026), presents the same dynamic in Vermont’s sports-participation context, and a coalition of states led by West Virginia filed amicus briefs tying these cases together (scag.gov filing, July 1, 2026).

The Court granted QP-2 squarely, which suggests it has appetite to police the Carson-narrowing trend. How it resolves QP-2 will determine whether Colorado’s approach — and Maine’s, and Vermont’s — survives in its current form, or whether states will need to choose between funding religious providers on their own terms and not funding them at all.

The Disability Brief: DREDF and the IDEA

On August 24, 2026, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and twelve disability and civil-rights organizations filed a merits brief in support of Colorado (docket doc. 419852). The amici — AdvocacyDenver, the Arc of the United States, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, the Colorado Disability Bar Association, CommunicationFIRST, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), Deaf Equality, Disability Justice (formerly Disability Law Colorado), Disability Law United, and the National Association of the Deaf — speak for the population whose legal position is, in their view, being held hostage to the petitioners’ comparator argument.

The brief’s central move is to reframe what the petitioners call the “IEP exemption.” The IEP preference, the brief argues, “is not an exception to that provision, but a requirement of its ‘equal opportunity’ language.” More pointedly, the brief identifies the petitioners’ argument for what it is: “In essence, Petitioners argue that state law ensuring children with disabilities are included in the UPK program as required by federal law justifies their request to exclude LGBTQ children and families.” Under the petitioners’ theory, the brief warns, “any unique treatment of disabled children is categorically off limits (or else, strict scrutiny applies).”

The IDEA’s Affirmative Duty Line

The brief grounds the IEP preference in a half-century of federal disability law that has moved steadily from exclusion to affirmative accommodation. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act traces its lineage to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Pub. L. 94-142), whose congressional findings documented that “more than half of the handicapped children in the United States [did] not receive appropriate educational services” and that “one million” were “excluded entirely from the public school system.” IDEA, as reauthorized, imposes an affirmative duty to identify, evaluate, and serve children with disabilities — including preschoolers, under the Part B obligations codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1412(a), 1414, and in the early-intervention findings at 20 U.S.C. § 1431. The Supreme Court’s decisions have consistently read that duty as one of active, individualized provision, not passive neutrality: Board of Education v. Rowley (1982) established the FAPE floor; Honig v. Doe (1988) affirmed federal enforcement against states and districts; Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 580 U.S. 386 (2017) — notably, a Colorado case — held that an IEP must be “reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances”; Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools (2017) clarified the interplay of IDEA and anti-discrimination statutes; and A.J.T. ex rel. A.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, 605 U.S. 335 (2025), held that disabled children cannot be subjected to heightened evidentiary burdens in damages actions.

Against that backdrop, the brief argues, the IEP preference is less like a discretionary exemption and more like the “reasonable accommodation” duty the Supreme Court has long recognized in disability law. It cites U.S. Airways v. Barnett, 535 U.S. 391, 397 (2002): “The Act requires preferences in the form of ‘reasonable accommodations’….” And it quotes then-Judge Gorsuch, writing for the Tenth Circuit in Cinnamon Hills Youth Crisis Center v. St. George City, 685 F.3d 917, 923 (10th Cir. 2012): “Of course, in some sense all reasonable accommodations treat the disabled not just equally but preferentially…. [I]t is sometimes necessary to dispense with formal equality of treatment in order to advance a more substantial equality of opportunity.” The amici chose their comparator carefully — the author of that line now sits on the Supreme Court, and his own words describe why disability preferences are constitutionally ordinary.

The Data: Accommodations Without Displacement

The brief also answers the empirical premise beneath the petitioners’ comparator argument — that religious providers are uniquely excluded while secular preferences flourish. The DREDF brief cites Colorado’s own UPK Annual Reports for 2023-24 and 2024-25: enrollment of children with IEPs was 13.5 percent of four-year-olds served in both program years — closely tracking the roughly 15 percent of public-school students nationwide served under IDEA (per NCES, Condition of Education: Students with Disabilities, 2024). There was no surge, no displacement of non-disabled children, no de facto separate system. Colorado’s own placement standards require classrooms serving children with IEPs to have “fewer than 50% of students with IEPs” (CDE Standards for Placement of Preschoolers with IEPs, 2024) — an anti-congregation rule that presumes integration, not exclusion.

The brief situates the preference in UPK’s legislative history as well: House Bill 22-1295 hearings featured testimony from parent Corinne DePersis, who described driving across Denver to reach the only program serving her daughter’s rare developmental disability; from Summit County Commissioner Elisabeth Lawrence on rural access; and from special-education directors on capacity constraints. And it grounds the preference’s necessity in a September 2, 2022 federal Office for Civil Rights complaint filed by Disability Law Colorado (OCR Case No. 08-22-1563), documenting the under-enrollment of students with disabilities in school-choice programs — a backdrop reported by Erica Meltzer in Chalkbeat Colorado on September 14, 2022. The history matters: Colorado added the IEP preference because choice systems without it were leaving disabled children behind, exactly as the 1975 Congress found the pre-IDEA system had.

Why Treating Accommodations as Suspect “Exemptions” Endangers Special Education

The brief’s structural argument deserves the closest attention from special-education parents. Petitioners’ general-applicability attack rests on a comparator: Colorado permits disability-based “discrimination” (the IEP preference) and income-based “discrimination” (Head Start) but not religion-based “discrimination.” If the Court accepts that framing — if an IEP seat preference is treated as constitutionally comparable to an exemption that lets secular providers exclude protected classes — then every disability accommodation in publicly funded programs becomes a litigation target. A provider that objects to serving a child with an IEP could argue the state’s accommodation of that child is a secular “exemption” that entitles the provider to its own exemption from the program’s rules. The IDEA’s accommodation duty would be constitutionalized into a zero-sum competition with free exercise, when the disability brief insists the two are not in tension at all: the IEP preference implements equal opportunity rather than undermining it.

The DREDF brief is thus the direct answer to the petitioners’ strongest argument, and it explains why so many disability organizations — including ones with no stake in LGBTQ litigation as such — chose to enter this case. The question the Court answers in QP-1 is not only about Catholic preschools and Colorado. It is about whether accommodations for children with disabilities, everywhere, are understood as requirements of equal access or as suspect deviations from it.## The Petitioners’ Case: Becket, the Archdiocese, and the Cost of Participation

The petitioners’ merits brief, filed June 25, 2026, with a four-volume joint appendix, tells a story of institutions squeezed out. The Archdiocese of Denver oversees 34 Catholic preschools. Since UPK began, the petitioners contend, two parish preschools have closed — Wellspring Catholic Academy (associated with St. Bernadette’s parish school) and Guardian Angels Catholic School — and parish-preschool enrollment has declined by “almost twenty percent.” These are petitioner-claimed figures, and Colorado disputes both the causation and, in part, the numbers: the respondents’ brief notes that St. Bernadette’s K-8 school (including its preschool) closed December 20, 2024 — after the litigation began — that its claim is therefore moot, and that “no record evidence indicates any link between UPK and any school’s financial struggles.” The Archdiocese’s own Superintendent of Catholic Schools testified at trial that preschool enrollment was “probably still holding steady,” and St. Bernadette’s principal attributed the decline to faculty divisions and a “toxic culture.” The record conflict is itself the finding: neither side’s framing of the enrollment data has been judicially credited, and the Court will confront a genuine factual dispute about whether participation in UPK on the state’s terms is financially ruinous to Catholic preschools or merely inconvenient.

The family petitioners put a human face on the stakes. Daniel and Lisa Sheley have five children at St. Mary’s school; two are currently in preschool, and a third is due to start in 2028. Because St. Mary’s preschool cannot accept UPK funds on Colorado’s terms, the Sheley family forfeits roughly fifteen hours per week of free preschool — the entire UPK entitlement — for each child they enroll in their parish program. For a family that has chosen Catholic education, the state’s benefit is available only on conditions they believe their faith forbids. The petitioners argue that this is precisely the coercion Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson forbid: a benefit “generally available” to everyone except those who exercise their religion in a disfavored way.

The petitioners’ doctrinal argument proceeds in two steps. First, under Fulton and Tandon, Colorado’s pattern of secular exemptions and discretionary mechanisms defeats general applicability — the IEP preference, the Head Start preference, the “specific community” preference, and the quality-standard discretion are all comparators showing Colorado tolerates secular deviations from its rules while refusing the religious one. Second, under Carson, Colorado’s exclusion of Catholic preschools is discrimination “because of” religious exercise even without explicit religious targeting, because the burden falls only on providers whose religious convictions prevent them from complying. The Tenth Circuit’s “explicit basis” test, they argue, gives every government a drafting template for defunding disfavored religious ministries — a template already deployed, they contend, in Youth 71Five, Kim, and Maine’s post-Carson statutes. Cert-stage support for this framing drew roughly twenty-one amicus briefs, including from West Virginia and twenty-one other states, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, EdChoice, the National Association of Evangelicals, and a spectrum of religious-liberty organizations; the merits stage drew more than thirty on each side, with the petitioners’ column including forty-three Members of Congress, the Orthodox Union, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and Professor Douglas Laycock, among others.

Colorado’s Defense: A Program Open to Religion, Closed to Exclusion

Colorado’s respondents’ brief, filed August 17, 2026, by Attorney General Philip J. Weiser’s office — with Solicitor General Shannon Wells Stevenson and Deputy Solicitor General Helen Norton as counsel of record — advances a layered defense.

First, participation and welcome: UPK includes forty faith-based providers and matched 904 children with them in its first year; religious providers teach religion freely within and beyond their UPK hours; the mandate regulates only refusals to serve eligible children based on protected-class status, not religious identity, curriculum, or worship. The Archdiocese’s schools are not excluded “because they are religious” — they are eligible like everyone else and decline the condition. On Colorado’s telling, Carson involved Maine’s exclusion of religious use from a benefit; UPK excludes no religious status or use, only discriminatory refusals of service in a public program.

Second, no exceptions exist: Colorado’s reformulated third question makes the point with statutory precision — the program “allows no exceptions to those requirements, authorizes no one to grant exceptions to those requirements, and allows no secular conduct that undermines the state’s equal-opportunity interests.” The IEP and Head Start preferences are not deviations from the equal-opportunity rule but specifications of it; the former “congregation” exemption was struck down precisely because the rule applies to everyone, including religious providers’ own preferred exclusions. Dr. Lisa Roy’s letter of February 28, 2023 — written before suit — said the quiet part: she does “not have the authority to create an exemption that excludes faith-based providers from the … statute,” while adding that “faith-based providers can, and are encouraged to, participate in the UPK program” (Pet.App.288a-90a). That letter, offered by the petitioners to show animus toward accommodation, Colorado offers to show the absence of any exemption pathway at all.

Third, the slippery slope has no floor: if neutral conditions on public benefits must yield to claim-by-claimant strict scrutiny whenever a recipient objects on religious grounds, then foster-care placement rules, food-assistance requirements, professional licensure conditions, even anti-corporal-punishment laws, all become case-by-case negotiations. Colorado argues petitioners’ rule would supply no workable limiting principle for the vast architecture of conditionally funded public programs.

Fourth, and in the alternative, Colorado argues it satisfies strict scrutiny anyway: the state has a compelling interest in nondiscriminatory access to publicly funded preschool across a network of nearly 2,000 providers that are not fungible — location, quality, and hours matter to families, and the district court found that for some rural LGBTQ+ families a religious provider is the only early-childhood option. The mandate is narrowly tailored, Colorado says, because it reaches only UPK-funded services: a parish’s K-8 school, soup kitchen, Sunday programming, and non-UPK hours remain untouched by the condition.

The Solicitor General’s Role on the Merits

The United States returned on July 2, 2026, with a merits brief supporting the petitioners — and, per Colorado’s characterization, arguing for more than the granted questions. Colorado’s brief reports that the Solicitor General contends Smith applies only to criminal laws and proposes that the parental-rights rule of Mahmoud v. Taylor (2026) — decided just this past June in the public-school curriculum context — be extended to religious institutions asserting free-exercise claims against conditions on public benefits. Colorado urges the Court to “summarily reject” that proposal “as outside the scope of the questions presented” (Resp. Br. § I.C, n.11).

The dynamic is unusual. The Court declined to decide whether Smith should be overruled; the federal government’s merits brief argues for a reading of Smith so narrow as to approach the same result through different means; and the case’s formal questions, on their face, concern general applicability and Carson’s reach. On August 31, 2026, the Solicitor General filed a motion for leave to file out of time, to participate in oral argument as amicus, and for divided argument — seeking a slice of the November 3 hour for the federal government’s distinct position. The motion was pending as of the docket snapshot reviewed for this article. For argument watchers, the composition of the podium will itself be a signal: petitioners’ counsel, Colorado’s Solicitor General, and possibly the U.S. Solicitor General, each defending a different theory of what the Free Exercise Clause requires of conditioned-benefit programs.

For disability advocates, the SG’s Mahmoud extension proposal is the wild card. If the Court adopted it, religious institutions could invoke parental-rights doctrine against program conditions — a path around both Smith and the general-applicability framework entirely, and one that would bypass the IEP-comparability question altogether while reaching a similar result. The disability briefs do not engage it at length; Colorado’s jurisdictional objection does. Whether the Justices confine themselves to the granted questions or follow the SG’s invitation will shape not just the holding but its doctrine-building reach.

The Amicus Landscape: Who Chose Sides, and Why It Signals the Stakes

A Crowded Docket on Both Sides

Few cases in recent Terms have drawn this depth of outside participation. At the certiorari stage, roughly twenty-one amicus briefs supported the petitioners — including West Virginia and twenty-one other states, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, EdChoice, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Notre Dame Education Law Project, the Thomas More Society, the Pacific Justice Institute, the Sutherland Institute, the Colorado Association of Private Schools, the Pioneer New England Legal Foundation, and a series of scholars and public-interest firms. At the merits stage, more than thirty amicus briefs were filed on each side. The petitioners’ merits column includes the United States, forty-three Members of Congress, the West Virginia-led states, the USCCB, the National Association of Evangelicals, EdChoice, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the Orthodox Union, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Thomas More Society, the American Center for Law and Justice, the Catholic League, Liberty Counsel, the Protect the First Foundation, Professor Douglas Laycock and fellow scholars, Crosspoint Church itself, and Darren Patterson Christian Academy.

The respondents’ merits column is equally telling, and it is where the case’s unusual coalition structure appears. Alongside the Massachusetts-and-Minnesota-led states, 179 Members of Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women’s Law Center, GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), COLAGE, Public Funds Public Schools, Children’s Rights, First Focus on Children, American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Interfaith Alliance, New Ways Ministry, historians of education, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, First Amendment scholars, and law-and-religion scholars, the DREDF-led disability brief stands out as the brief written from the perspective of the program’s intended beneficiaries — the children, disabled and nondisabled alike, whom a universal program is supposed to serve.

Why the Disability Briefs Entered a Religious-Liberty Case

It is worth pausing on how unusual that intervention is. Organizations like the Arc of the United States, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, COPAA, and the National Association of the Deaf do not ordinarily file briefs in Free Exercise Clause litigation. They did so here because the petitioners’ legal theory runs directly through their constituents’ legal protections. The petitioners could have built their general-applicability argument on the Head Start income preference alone, or on the “specific community” preference, or on the quality-standard discretion. Instead, as the DREDF brief observes, their argument leans substantially on the IEP preference — the provision most tightly bound to federal disability law — as a comparator showing that Colorado tolerates secular “discrimination” but punishes religious “discrimination.”

That choice made the disability community a party in fact, if not in name. If the Court accepts the comparator, the constitutional status of IDEA-mandated accommodation is diminished; if it rejects the comparator, the constitutional status of IDEA-mandated accommodation is affirmed in the same breath that resolves the religious-liberty question. Either way, the IEP preference will be discussed, distinguished, or deployed in the opinion — which is why disability counsel chose to file in a case whose caption does not mention disability at all.

The Coalition Signals the Doctrine’s Reach

The breadth of both amicus columns reflects a shared understanding among the participants: this case will supply the governing template for conditioned public benefits — preschool, K-12 choice programs, early intervention, after-school grants, and beyond. The states supporting the petitioners fear that programs like Oregon’s early-learning exclusions (upheld in Bates v. Pakseresht) and Maine’s post-Carson carve-outs will spread; the states supporting Colorado fear that a petitioners’ win would force them to choose between abandoning nondiscrimination conditions and abandoning private-provider participation altogether. The disability organizations fear the former dynamic through the IEP lens; the religious providers fear the latter through the exclusion lens. The Court’s opinion will be read — by legislatures, agencies, and litigants in all fifty states — as the rule for how those fears are reconciled.

What This Means for Parents

The IEP Preference Is the Case’s Quiet Center

For parents of children with disabilities, the abstract doctrinal questions resolve into one concrete concern: whether the accommodations your child depends on remain constitutionally secure when a state funds private providers. Colorado’s IEP preference exists because a statewide choice program without it replicated the pre-IDEA pattern — disabled children under-enrolled, underserved, or left out entirely, as the Disability Law Colorado OCR complaint documented in 2022. The preference reserves seats so that children with IEPs are actually present in the programs public money supports. If the Supreme Court holds that such a preference defeats general applicability — that it is a suspect “exemption” comparable to letting providers exclude children — then every state that funds private providers and honors the IDEA within them will face the same constitutional challenge, and the defense of those preferences will require litigating the IDEA from scratch in each program. A ruling for Colorado, by contrast, would endorse the framing the disability brief advances: accommodations are not exceptions to equal opportunity but its implementation.

Massachusetts Is Already on the Record

Massachusetts joined the multistate amicus brief supporting Colorado, filed August 24, 2026 ( Massachusetts, Minnesota et al.). The Commonwealth’s Attorney General thus stands behind the proposition that nondiscrimination conditions on public early-childhood funding are constitutional, and that the Tenth Circuit’s approach to general applicability is sound. Massachusetts has no UPK-style universal program at present, but it is among the states where mixed-delivery early-childhood funding — public money flowing to private and faith-based providers, attached to conditions — is the operative model. The NIEER figures cited in the petitioners’ briefing describe sixteen states plus D.C. funding universal pre-K through such systems; any future Massachusetts movement toward universal pre-K would immediately confront the St. Mary rule, whichever way it goes. For Massachusetts parents, this is a template case: the argument Colorado won below is the argument a future Commonwealth program would make, and the disability-preference question at the heart of QP-1 would arrive here with it.

Preschool IEPs and the Mixed-Delivery Reality

The IDEA’s preschool obligations — Part B services for children ages three through five, implemented through regulations including 34 C.F.R. §§ 300.114-300.120 governing least restrictive environment and placement — attach to public placements and to publicly funded programs that accept IDEA conditions. As mixed-delivery pre-K expands nationally, the boundary between “public” and “private” preschool grows more porous: a child’s IEP services may be delivered in a community-based setting that receives public funds but remains privately operated. St. Mary tests whether states can keep requiring equal-opportunity and disability-access conditions as the price of that public money when the providers are religious. A broad petitioners’ win would not strip any child’s existing IEP — the IDEA would remain fully enforceable against public agencies — but it could make private-provider participation in publicly funded pre-K systems more conditional, more litigated, and potentially less available to children whose accommodations providers prefer not to accommodate.

Reading the Argument Signals

Parents watching the November 3 argument should listen for how the Justices treat the IEP preference specifically. If the Court’s questioning frames the preference as an ordinary federal-compliance measure — a seat reservation required to honor the IDEA — the disability community’s framing is landing. If Justices press Colorado on why disability-based “discrimination” is permitted but religion-based “discrimination” is not, and Colorado’s counsel cannot distinguish IDEA-mandated accommodation from the secular-exemption catalog, the petitioners’ comparator argument is gaining traction. The DREDF brief armed the state with the distinction; whether it persuades is precisely what the argument will reveal.

What to Watch

The argument itself, November 3, 2026. The case leads the Supreme Court’s November sitting and opens what commentators have described as a religion-and-education-heavy October Term 2026 (Kelsey Dallas, SCOTUSblog, September 2, 2026).
Divided argument. The Solicitor General’s August 31, 2026 motion seeks argument time to present the United States’ distinct — and broader — position. Watch whether the Court grants it and how much time each side receives.
QP-1’s breadth. A narrow holding — “Colorado’s rule was generally applicable because no exceptions existed under state law” — would leave the circuit split intact and the IEP question untouched. A broad holding articulating a national rule for evaluating secular exemptions in benefit programs would either constitutionalize the petitioners’ comparator theory (endangering disability accommodations) or entrench the Fulton/Tandon comparative test (entrenching the majority rule). The opinion’s treatment of the IEP preference will be the tell.
QP-2 and the post-Carson states. A robust QP-2 holding policing the “explicit basis” narrowing line would unsettle Maine’s post-Carson statutes and Vermont’s sports-participation litigation (Mid-Vermont Christian School v. Saunders) — and would reshape how states draft nondiscrimination conditions on educational funding generally.
Smith’s shadow. The Court declined to decide whether Smith survives, but four Justices have criticized it, the SG proposes reading it down to criminal laws, and the cert-stage brief itself acknowledged the general-applicability resolution “could obviate” the question. Whatever the majority says about Smith’s vitality — even in passing — will be parsed for OT2027 signals.
The same term’s docket. The Court has pending petitions seeking to revisit Locke v. Davey (2004), which permitted states to exclude theology students from otherwise available scholarship programs — including Hall v. Fleming (No. 26-193) and a related Virginia tuition case (docket No. 26-240) and Woolard v. Thurmond (No. 26-237, involving California homeschool independent-study funds) — plus Ten Commandments-display petitions (Dier v. Landry, No. 26-256; Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, No. 26-257). Together with St. Mary, these frame a term in which the Court’s religion-and-education doctrine may be redrawn on multiple fronts at once.
The decision’s timing. No decision is expected before spring 2027, when OT2026 argued cases are typically resolved.

Conclusion

St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy arrived at the Supreme Court as a dispute between Catholic preschools and Colorado’s equal-opportunity mandate. It will be decided — at least formally — as a pair of doctrinal questions about when neutral conditions on public benefits must yield to religious objection: whether Colorado’s pattern of secular accommodations defeats general applicability under Smith as narrowed or extended by Fulton and Tandon, and whether Carson v. Makin reaches exclusions that never mention religion explicitly. But the case’s real center of gravity, for the families this publication serves, is a single regulatory sentence reserving UPK seats for children with IEPs.

The petitioners argue that Colorado’s willingness to prefer children with disabilities while refusing to exempt Catholic preschools from serving LGBTQ families proves the state’s rules are a facade for viewpoint discrimination. Colorado and the disability organizations standing with it argue the opposite: that the IEP preference is not a favor but a federal obligation — the modern heir to the 1975 Congress’s finding that a million disabled children had been excluded from public education entirely — and that a Constitution read to strike down such accommodations would pit the IDEA against the First Amendment in every publicly funded classroom in America. The Tenth Circuit called Colorado’s program “a model example” of balancing nondiscrimination with religious accommodation. On November 3, 2026, the Supreme Court will decide whether that model is a constitutional blueprint or a constitutional violation — and in doing so, it will say something consequential about whether accommodations for children with disabilities are requirements of equal opportunity or exceptions to it. For parents of the one in seven American schoolchildren with an IEP, that sentence — not the headlines about preschools and LGBTQ families — is the one to read most carefully.

Sources

Supreme Court of the United States, Docket No. 25-581, St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado, et al. v. Lisa Roy, in her official capacity as Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, et al. — docket entries, including grant order of April 20, 2026 (limited to Questions 1 and 2) and argument setting of August 11, 2026 (argument November 3, 2026).
Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, No. 25-581, filed November 13, 2025 (verbatim Questions Presented; Statement of the Case; appendix including Tenth Circuit opinion and Colorado statutes and regulations).
Order list, Supreme Court of the United States, April 20, 2026 (certiorari granted in No. 25-581).
Petitioners’ Merits Brief, No. 25-581, filed June 25, 2026 (Becket Fund for Religious Liberty; petitioner-claimed figures: 34 Catholic preschools, two closures, ~20% enrollment decline; Sheley family details; exemptions catalog).
Joint Appendix (4 volumes), No. 25-581, filed June 25, 2026 (Dawn Odean trial testimony, App.353-355, 363; disclaimer of waiver authority, JA347-49).
Respondents’ Merits Brief, No. 25-581, filed August 17, 2026 (Colorado Attorney General Philip J. Weiser; Solicitor General Shannon Wells Stevenson; Deputy Solicitor General Helen Norton; reformulated Questions Presented; respondents’ figures and record citations, including Pet.App.91a).
Brief of Amici Curiae Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and 12 Disability and Civil Rights Organizations in Support of Respondents, No. 25-581, filed August 24, 2026 (docket doc. 419852; IDEA duty line; Cinnamon Hills and Barnett quotations; CDEC UPK Annual Report IEP figures, 13.5% in 2023-24 and 2024-25; H.B. 22-1295 hearing testimony; OCR Case No. 08-22-1563).
Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae (cert stage), No. 25-581, filed January 30, 2026 (general-applicability position; Smith-vitality passage at p. 30).
Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae (merits), No. 25-581, filed July 2, 2026 (supporting petitioners; Smith-narrowing and Mahmoud-extension positions as characterized by respondents).
Motion for Divided Argument of the Solicitor General, No. 25-581, filed August 31, 2026.
Petitioners’ Reply Brief, No. 25-581, filed September 16, 2026.
Brief of Amici Curiae Massachusetts, Minnesota, et al. (states) in Support of Respondents, No. 25-581, filed August 24, 2026.
Brief of Amici Curiae 179 Members of Congress, No. 25-581, filed August 24, 2026.
St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, 154 F.4th 752 (10th Cir. Sept. 30, 2025) (“a model example…”, App.42a; IEP and Head Start preferences “are not exceptions to the nondiscrimination requirement,” Pet.App.38a).
St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, 736 F. Supp. 3d 956 (D. Colo. June 4, 2024) (findings of fact and conclusions of law; Archdiocese dismissed for lack of associational standing).
Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990); Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021); Tandon v. Newsom, 593 U.S. 61 (2021); Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. 767 (2022); Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 591 U.S. 574 (2020); Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, 582 U.S. 449 (2017); Dr. A v. Hochul, 142 S. Ct. 2569 (2022) (Thomas, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari).
Board of Education v. Rowley, 458 U.S. 176 (1982); Honig v. Doe, 484 U.S. 305 (1988); Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 580 U.S. 386 (2017); Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools, 580 U.S. 154 (2017); A.J.T. ex rel. A.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, 605 U.S. 335 (2025); U.S. Airways v. Barnett, 535 U.S. 391 (2002); Cinnamon Hills Youth Crisis Center v. St. George City, 685 F.3d 917 (10th Cir. 2012).
Circuit-split authorities as cited in the parties’ briefing: Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District, 82 F.4th 664 (9th Cir. 2023) (en banc); Bates v. Pakseresht, 146 F.4th 772 (9th Cir. 2025); Blackhawk v. Pennsylvania, 381 F.3d 202 (3d Cir. 2004); Fraternal Order of Police, Newark Lodge No. 12 v. City of Newark, 170 F.3d 359 (3d Cir. 1999); Smith v. Atlantic City, 138 F.4th 759 (3d Cir. 2025); Monclova Christian Academy v. Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, 984 F.3d 477 (6th Cir. 2020); Midrash Sephardi, Inc. v. Town of Surfside, 366 F.3d 1214 (11th Cir. 2004); Emilee Carpenter v. James, 107 F.4th 92 (2d Cir. 2024); Miller v. McDonald, 130 F.4th 258 (2d Cir. 2025); Spillane v. Lamont, 323 A.3d 1007 (Conn. 2024); North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group v. San Diego County, 189 P.3d 959 (Cal. 2008).
St. Dominic Academy v. Makin, 744 F. Supp. 3d 43 (D. Me. 2024); Crosspoint Church v. Makin, 719 F. Supp. 3d 99 (D. Me. 2024); Mid-Vermont Christian School v. Saunders, D. Vt. No. 2:23-cv-652 (order denying preliminary injunction May 12, 2026).
Colorado UPK statutory and regulatory framework: Colo. Rev. Stat. §§ 26.5-4-201 et seq. (H.B. 22-1295, 2022); equal-opportunity mandate, § 26.5-4-205(2)(b); 8 Colo. Code Regs. § 1404-1, §§ 4.109(A)(3), 4.109(A)(9); CDEC UPK Annual Reports 2023-24 and 2024-25 (IEP enrollment figures); CDE Standards for Placement of Preschoolers with IEPs (2024).
Dr. Lisa Roy, letter regarding UPK and faith-based providers, February 28, 2023 (Pet.App.288a-90a); Archdiocese of Denver coalition letter, February 17, 2023 (Pet.App.283a).
Disability Law Colorado, federal OCR complaint, Case No. 08-22-1563, filed September 2, 2022; as reported by Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat Colorado, September 14, 2022.
Amy Howe, “Supreme Court will hear religious liberty case on Catholic preschools and LGBTQ families,” SCOTUSblog, April 20, 2026.
Amy Howe, “Court announces cases it will hear in November, including religious discrimination dispute,” SCOTUSblog, August 11, 2026.
John Elwood, Relist Watch, SCOTUSblog, April 15, 2026 ( Solicitor General cert-stage brief quotation at p. 30; relisting history; amicus counts).
Amy Howe, “Why does the government keep showing up at the Supreme Court uninvited?”, SCOTUSblog, April 16, 2026.
Kelsey Dallas, “Why religion and education will be in the spotlight next term,” SCOTUSblog, September 2, 2026 (UPK program description; Locke v. Davey revisitation petitions Hall v. Fleming No. 26-193, related docket No. 26-240, Woolard v. Thurmond No. 26-237; Ten Commandments petitions Dier v. Landry No. 26-256 and Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD No. 26-257).
National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) figures as cited in petitioners’ merits brief (state-funded preschool enrollment exceeding 1.75 million children in 2023-24; 16 states plus D.C. funding universal preschool); NCES, Condition of Education: Students with Disabilities (2024), as cited in the DREDF brief.