Release Time for Religious Instruction

The Honorable Clay Yarborough

Florida Senate

308 Senate Building

404 South Monroe Street

Tallahassee, Florida 32399

Dear Senator Yarborough:

I received your letter dated March 26, 2026, requesting a legal opinion on a question of Florida law.[1] You ask whether section 1003.21(2)(b)1., Florida Statutes, as well as the Supreme Court decisions in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952), and Mahmoud v. Taylor, 606 U.S. 522 (2025), require public schools to accommodate parental requests for their children to participate in release time for religious instruction (“RTRI”).

In short, my answer to your question is yes. Florida law, consistent with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Zorach and Mahmoud, prohibits public schools from restricting parents’ efforts to direct the religious upbringing of their children, including participation in RTRI.

BACKGROUND[2]

RTRI permits public school students—at the direction of their parents—to be excused for a portion of the school day to attend religious instruction or devotional exercises off school property. A parent must first make a request to the school to allow his child to have access to and participate in RTRI. Once the school approves, a child will then be permitted to leave the school grounds to participate in religious instruction offered by a religious entity.

As explained below, county school boards (“school boards”) must grant RTRI requests. But certain school boards within Florida have either provided blanket denials for RTRI programs or placed various restrictions on the offerings of RTRI. Some school boards, for example, have prohibited the release of students during school hours, and others have enacted policies restricting students of certain grade-levels from participating in RTRI. Both practices violate Florida law.

ANALYSIS

Parental rights and corresponding duties are fundamental and prepolitical. They do not arise from or require written law to exist or be effective. Luckily, however, Florida’s constitution and laws fully recognize and protect them.[3] And Florida statutes further affirm these rights and duties by granting broad authority to parents to direct both the education and the “moral and religious training” of their children.[4]

Most relevant here is section 1003.21(2)(b)1., Florida Statutes, which provides that every school board in the State of Florida, “in accordance with the rules of the State Board of Education, shall adopt policies authorizing a parent to request and be granted permission for absence of a student from school” to attend “[r]eligious instruction or religious holidays.” This parallels section 1002.20(2)(c), Florida Statutes, which ensures that “[a] parent of a public school student may request and be granted permission for absence of the student from school for religious instruction or religious holidays” consistent with section 1003.21. As the Florida Supreme Court has confirmed: “The word ‘shall’ is mandatory in nature.”[5] Clearly, then, Florida law requires school districts to grant parental requests for their children to participate in RTRI.

Crucially, RTRI enables parents to honor their sacred duties to raise their children in the faith. The Lord—author of our natural rights and duties—requires nothing less: “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”[6]

Parents’ exercise of these rights and duties redound to the State’s benefit. First, it relieves the State of the primary cost and responsibility of shaping the civic and moral character of succeeding generations. Second, it ensures that succeeding generations of citizens are properly shaped in terms of civic, moral, and religious character—an ingredient essential to the maintenance and longevity of our republican system of government. After all, “[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[7] The Framers of the Florida Constitution acknowledged the same.[8]

It is natural and proper, therefore, for civil authorities to recognize and protect these rights. In fact, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that such rights are “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized.”[9] And many giants of the western legal tradition have recognized that parental rights inhere in the very nature of the family unit. Children do not understand “how to govern themselves.”[10] Their “wants and weaknesses” thus “render it necessary that some person maintains them” until adulthood.[11] Parents have traditionally been entrusted as “the most fit and proper person[s]” for that task.[12] Parental duties being firmly established, there must be adequate space to perform them. So the common law equipped parents with equally robust parental rights. “[H]ousehold heads” were empowered to “speak for their dependents in dealings with the larger world,”[13] and parents enjoyed the “right . . . to govern their children’s growth.”[14]

This natural, prepolitical right over one’s child includes the right to direct the child’s education,[15] and their religious upbringing.[16] RTRI fits comfortably within these two domains.

These basic ideas were recently confirmed in Mahmoud v. Taylor, where the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed parents’ right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. Key to Mahmoud was the conclusion that public schools cannot refuse to provide advance notice and opt-outs when those schools present material that “substantially interferes” with parents’ religious beliefs or the religious development of their children.[17] The Court confirmed that the “practice of educating one’s children in one’s religious beliefs . . . receives a generous measure of protection from our Constitution.”[18] To hold otherwise would be to embrace a “chilling vision of the power of the state to strip away the critical right of parents to guide the religious development of their children.”[19]

Case law further supports the requirement of school districts to implement RTRI programs. In 1952, the United States Supreme Court in Zorach v. Clauson upheld a New York statute authorizing release time for “religious observance and education.”[20] The Court declared that “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being” and “[w]hen the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities . . . it follows the best of our traditions.”[21] Several other states have enacted similar RTRI statutes, and those programs have repeatedly been upheld as constitutional.[22]

To deny a parent’s right to direct the religious upbringing and education of their children triggers the highest burden on the government. Section 1014.03, Florida Statutes, prohibits governmental entities or institutions—including public schools—from infringing such a right without demonstrating that such infringement is “reasonably necessary to achieve a compelling state interest and…is narrowly tailored and is not otherwise served by a less restrictive means.”[23] School boards that offer blanket denials for RTRI participation fail that test. So too do other arbitrary conditions on participation—including, for example, restricting involvement to outside of school hours or limiting participation to students in certain grades. These efforts to deny RTRI requests or restrict student participation therein violate Florida law, the Florida Constitution, and the U.S. Constitution.

CONCLUSION

[1]Florida’s Constitution, statutes, and the relevant case law support the fundamental rights of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children. And the express language in section 1003.21(2)(b)1.[24] requires school boards to adopt policies that grant parental requests to release their children for religious instruction. Any public school[25] that denies the right of a parent to have their child participate in RTRI not only violates Florida law but also substantially interferes with the constitutionally protected parental right reaffirmed by Mahmoud and Mirabelli.[26]

Sincerely,

James Uthmeier

Attorney General