It takes a village to raise a child. In Maine, it takes an island to send a child to a religiously aligned school with public funds.

In March, Swan’s Island townspeople made a community decision to subsidize a neighbor’s choice to send their children to a sectarian school on the mainland and approved a “nondiscrimination family policy.” The measure passed 57-44, the Bangor Daily News reported.

Two students – both from the same family – now attend nonsecular schools with the subsidy, according to the island’s town office. Those students are trailblazers in an long-running debate in Maine about state law against public tuition subsidies for non-secular schools.

On Nov. 27, the U.S. Supreme Court declined – for the second time this decade – to review Maine’s 25-year-old law that removed the subsidy. Since the 1870s, the state has reimbursed families, living in towns without schools, for tuition to private schools inside and outside Maine.

Only a handful of states have such a program, which is viewed as key to sustaining rural communities. The Maine Department of Education, in 2004-2005, reported spending $41.6 million for tuition to nonpublic schools. About 6,700 students, excluding those with special needs, receive a tuition subsidy.

Since the late 1990s, several families – including many from Minot and Durham – have crusaded to re-open the subsidy for nonsecular schools. The Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm that represented the Maine families pro bono, called the state’s law “blanket government discrimination.”

Maine officials, however, say the state can choose whether to provide the tuition subsidy for non-secular schools. The courts, so far, have agreed.

With legal challenges exhausted, and the Legislature having declined to re-examine tuition subsidies as well, it appears the only chance for this issue to progress is on the local level.

Which gets back to Swan’s Island.

The family subsidy policy passed despite warnings by attorneys but, so far, the town office reports just one irked taxpayer. The policy is creative and provincial: town funds flow to the parents, who can use them – if they so desire – for the school tuition of their choice.

Proponents of the subsidy point to cost efficiency. It impacted Swan’s Island voters, as the nonsecular high school on Mt. Desert Island cost $8,000 for tuition, while the sectarian school’s tuition was $3,600. Analysts say private tuitions are consistently lower than Maine’s per-pupil cost, which was $7,760 for K-12 in 2004-2005.

For families of Maine’s small towns – such as Minot and Durham – who are eligible for the tuition reimbursement, but wish to enroll their children in a nonsecular school, it could be more effective to ask their neighbors for support rather than the state or the U.S. Supreme Court. Those avenues are apparently closed.

Swan’s Island taxpayers stuck their necks out for their neighbors. Other towns, if they wish, could as well.