Everson v. Board of Education - American Education

A landmark 1946 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Ewing Township (New Jersey) Board of Education had not violated the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution by reimbursing parents of parochial, as well as private, school children for school bus costs. The court ruled that the program had provided no funds to the schools themselves and, therefore, had done nothing to promote establishment of a religion. The case was the first application of the establishment clause of the Constitution to education, and it became the core of a series of legal cases based on the child benefit theory, which holds that universally available aid provided directly to children and benefiting only them cannot be construed as being of any benefit to the schools which they attend. (See also Aguilar v. Felton; church-state conflicts; MEEK V. PITTINGER; MITCHELL V. HELMS; WOLMAN V. WALTER.)