A quest by Brookwood Presbyterian Church to become a charter-school sponsor could open a new chapter in Ohio's experience with the state-funded, privately run public schools, which have proved increasingly popular with parents unhappy with conventional public schools.

The case raises issues not just about Brookwood's fitness to supervise a charter school, but also whether any religious organization should be allowed to do so.

Guidance from the Ohio Supreme Court would be welcome.

To date, the state never has approved a church as a charter-school sponsor, but Brookwood maintains that the law creating charter schools doesn't expressly forbid it. The church turned to the courts after the Ohio Department of Education rejected its application to become the legal sponsor of an education program it has run since 2002. The Franklin County Common Pleas Court and the Franklin County Court of Appeals both rejected Brookwood's lawsuit, which is now before the high court.

The Brookwood Community Learning Center, housed at the East Side church, serves 64 students with autism and other special needs, operating under the auspices of another charter school, ScholARTS Public Community Schools. Children who enroll in the program receive all their instruction at Brookwood but receive their diplomas, if they graduate, from ScholARTS.  ScholARTS could face closure because of poor academic performance, and Brookwood would like to sponsor its education program directly, as well as open other schools.

In denying the application, the Department of Education said that Brookwood Presbyterian Church is not "an education-oriented entity," which state law requires sponsors to be. Church leaders dispute that, pointing to the Presbyterian Church's long history of supporting public education, and maintain they're being rejected just because Brookwood is a church.  Whether or not state law forbids religious organizations as charter sponsors, public perception of the charter program since its inception nearly 15 years ago has been that it is the secular side of the school-choice effort, compared with vouchers, which are grants the state gives to families to pay for private education. Vouchers can be and often are used at Catholic and other religious schools.

Whatever the court decides, the legislature might want to revisit the issue of churches as sponsors. While using state money to fund a school operated by a church raises the issue of church-state separation, some precedent exists in that parochial and other religious schools often receive state and federal money for special services, such as Title I reading-instruction assistance. Such schools take care to separate the government-funded activities from religious instruction. And the state's voucher program obviously links church and state.

In Brookwood's case, the church says the learning center's mission is not to offer religious education but to help children who, in many cases, have been tossed out of more than one school already for behavior linked to their disabilities. Leaders contend they've developed expertise in helping those hard-to-educate kids; that expertise, they say, is lacking in many charter-school sponsors. Given the high proportion of charter-school students with disabilities and behavior problems, Brookwood might be a valuable addition to the charter-school picture.

The issue merits serious consideration.