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A. 1. a.(1)(a) i) a) I A 1 a (1)(a) i) a)@@FTNFormats for each footnote,  X` hp x (#%'0*,.8135@8: ing Aguilar and much of Ball. But the Court errs. Its  J holding that Aguilar and the portion of Ball addressing  J the Shared Time program are no longer good law, ante, at 29, rests on mistaken reading.  ;H2 d d8A؃  J  2  Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School Dist., 509 U.S., at 13!14, held that the Establishment Clause does not prevent a school district from providing a signlanguage interpreter to a deaf student enrolled in a sectarian  Jl school. The Court today relies solely on Zobrest to support its contention that we have abandoned the  J presumption erected in Meek [v. Pittenger, 421 U. S. 349  J (1975)] and Ball that the placement of public employees on parochial school grounds inevitably results in the impermissible effect of statesponsored indoctrination or constitutes a symbolic union between government and  JT religion. Ante, at 17. Zobrest, however, is no such  J, sanction for overruling Aguilar or any portion of Ball.  J  In Zobrest the Court did indeed recognize that the Establishment Clause lays down no absolute bar to "    J placing public employees in a sectarian school, Zobrest, 509 U. S., at 13, and n. 10, but the rejection of such a  J per se rule was hinged expressly on the nature of the employee's job, signlanguage interpretation (or signing) and the circumscribed role of the signer. On this point (and without reference to the facts that the benefited student had received the same aid before enrolling in the religious school and the employee was to be assigned to the student not to the school) the Court explained itself this way: [T]he task of a signlanguage interpreter seems to us quite different from that of a teacher or guidance counselor.... Nothing in this record suggests that a signlanguage interpreter would do more than accurately interpret whatever material is presented to the class as a whole. In fact, ethical guidelines require interpreters to `transmit everything that is said in  J exactly the same way it was intended.' !  Id., at 13. The signer could thus be seen as more like a hearing aid than a teacher, and the signing could not be understood as an opportunity to inject religious content in what was  J supposed to be secular instruction. Zobrest accordingly holds only that in these limited circumstances where a public employee simply translates for one student the material presented to the class for the benefit of all students, the employee's presence in the sectarian school  J does not violate the Establishment Clause.  Id., at  J 13!14. Cf. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 617 (1971) ( [T]eachers have a substantially different ideological character from books [and] [i]n terms of potential for involving some aspect of faith or morals in secular subjects, a textbook's content is ascertainable, but a teacher's handling of a subject is not).  The Court, however, ignores the careful distinction  J drawn in Zobrest and insists that a fulltime public employee such as a Title I teacher is just like the signer, asserting that there is no reason to presume that, simply because she enters a parochial school` "   classroom, ... [this] teacher will depart from her assigned duties and instructions and embark on religious  J indoctrination .... Ante, at 20. Whatever may be the merits of this position (and I find it short on merit), it  J` does not enjoy the authority of Zobrest. The Court may  J8 disagree with Ball's assertion that a publicly employed teacher working in a sectarian school is apt to reinforce  J the pervasive inculcation of religious beliefs, but its disagreement is fresh law.  J  The Court tries to press Zobrest into performing another service beyond its reach. The Court says that  JH Ball and Aguilar assumed that the presence of a public employee on private school property creates an impermissible `symbolic link' between government and reli J gion, ante, at 18, and that Zobrest repudiated this  J assumption. Ante, at 17!18. First, Ball and Aguilar said nothing about the mere presence of public employ JX ees at religious schools. It was Ball that specifically addressed the point and held only that when teachers employed by public schools are placed in religious schools to provide instruction to students during the schoolday a symbolic union of church and state is created and will reasonably be seen by the students as  Jh endorsement, see Ball, 473 U. S., at 390!392; Aguilar  J@ adopted the same conclusion by reference, see Aguilar,  J 473 U. S., at 409. Zobrest did not, implicitly or otherwise, repudiate the view that the involvement of public teachers in the instruction provided within sectarian schools looks like a partnership or union and implies approval of the sectarian aim. On the subject of symbolic unions and the strength of their implications,  J( the lesson of Zobrest is merely that less is less.  ;H2 d d8B؃  J<  <2  The Court next claims that Ball rested on the assumption that any and all public aid that directly aids the educational function of religious schools impermissibly "   finances religious indoctrination, even if the aid reaches such schools as a consequence of private decision J making. Ante, at 15!16. After Ball, the opinion continues, the Court departed from the rule that all government aid that directly aids the educational  J8 function of religious schools is invalid. !  Ante, at 19.  J But this mischaracterizes Ball's discussion on the point,  J and misreads Witters and Zobrest as repudiating the  J more modest proposition on which Ball in fact rested.  J  Ball did not establish that any and all such aid to religious schools necessarily violates the Establishment Clause. It held that the Shared Time program subsidized the religious functions of the parochial schools by taking over a significant portion of their responsibility  J for teaching secular subjects. See Ball, supra, at 396!397. The Court noted that it had never accepted the mere possibility of subsidization ... as sufficient to invalidate an aid program, and instead enquired whether the effect of the proffered aid was direct and substantial (and, so, unconstitutional) or merely indirect and incidental, (and, so, permissible) emphasiz J ing that the question is one of degree. Ball, supra, at  J 394 (quoting Committee for Public Ed. & Religious  Jh Liberty v. Nyquist, 413 U.S. 756, 784!785, n. 39 (1973),  J@ and Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 314 (1952)).  J Witters and Zobrest did nothing to repudiate the principle, emphasizing rather the limited nature of the aid at issue in each case as well as the fact that religious institutions did not receive it directly from the State. In  Jx Witters, the Court noted that the State would issue the disputed vocational aid directly to one student who would then transmit it to the school of his choice, and that there was no record evidence that any significant portion of the aid expended under the Washington program as a whole will end up flowing to religious  J education. Witters, 474 U. S., at 488. Zobrest also presented an instance of a single beneficiary, see` "    J Zobrest, 509 U. S., at 4, and emphasized that the student (who had previously received the interpretive services in a public school) determined where the aid would be used, that the aid at issue was limited, and that the religious school was not relieved of an expense that it otherwise would have assumed in educating its  J students. See id., at 12.  It is accordingly puzzling to find the Court insisting that the aid scheme administered under Title I and  J considered in Aguilar was comparable to the programs  Jp in Witters and Zobrest. Instead of aiding isolated  JH individuals within a school system, New York City's  J Title I program before Aguilar served about 22,000 private school students, all but 52 of whom attended  J religious schools. See App. 313!314.  uB8 ԍ FTN    XgEpXFr  ddf < The Court's refusal to recognize the extent of student participa uB tion as relevant to the constitutionality of an aid program, see ante,  uB at 23, ignores the contrary conclusion in Witters v. Washington Dept.  uB] of Servs. for Blind, 474 U.S. 481 (1986), on this very point. See  uB id., at 488 (noting, among relevant factors, that [n]o evidence ha[d] been presented indicating that any other person ha[d] ever sought to finance religious education or activity pursuant to the State's program). Instead of serving individual blind or deaf students, as such, Title  J I as administered in New York City before Aguilar (and as now to be revived) funded instruction in core subjects (remedial reading, reading skills, remedial mathematics, English as a second language) and provided guidance  J services. See Aguilar, 473 U. S., at 406. Instead of providing a service the school would not otherwise furnish, the Title I services necessarily relieved a religious school of an expense that it otherwise would  J@ have assumed, Zobrest, supra, at 12, and freed its funds for other, and sectarian uses.  Finally, instead of aid that comes to the religious school indirectly in the sense that its distribution results H"   from private decisionmaking, a public educational agency distributes Title I aid in the form of programs and  J services directly to the religious schools. In Zobrest and  J Witters, it was fair to say that individual students were themselves applicants for individual benefits on a scale that could not amount to a systemic supplement. But under Title I, a local educational agency (which in New York City is the Board of Education) may receive federal funding by proposing programs approved to serve individual students who meet the criteria of need, which it then uses to provide such programs at the religious schools, see App. 28!29, 38, 60, 242!243; students eligible for such programs may not apply directly for  J Title I funds.  uB` ԍ FTN    XgEpXFr  ddf < For this reason, the Court's attempted analogy between Title I  uB and IDEA fails, see ante, at 22; James Zobrest, unlike students receiving Title I services, applied individually for the interpretative  uB services at issue in Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School Dist., 509 U.S. 1, 4 (1993). The aid, accordingly, is not even formally aid to the individual students (and even formally individual aid must be seen as aid to a school system when so many individuals receive it that it becomes a  JX significant feature of the system, see Wolman v. Walter, 433 U.S., at 264 (opinion of Powell, J.)).  J  In sum, nothing since Ball and Aguilar and before this case has eroded the distinction between direct and substantial and indirect and incidental. That principled line is being breached only here and now.  ;H2 d d8C؃  2  The Court notes that aid programs providing benefits solely to religious groups may be constitutionally suspect, while aid allocated under neutral, secular criteria is less likely to have the effect of advancing  J6 religion. Ante, at 25. The opinion then says that Ball  J and Aguilar gave this consideration no weight, ibid.,#"   and accordingly conflict with a number of decisions.  J Butwhat exactly the Court thinks Ball and Aguilar inadequately considered is not clear, given that evenhandedness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for an aid program to satisfy constitutional scrutiny. Title I services are available to all eligible children regardless whether they go to religious or public schools, but, as I have explained elsewhere and am not  J alone in recognizing, see, e.g., Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at  J ____ (slip op., at 1!2) (O'Connor, J., concurring); id., at  Jp ____ (slip op., at 18!24) (Souter, J., dissenting); see  JH also Bowen v. Kendrick, 487 U.S. 589, 614, 621 (1988), that fact does not define the reach of the Establishment Clause. If a scheme of government aid results in support for religion in some substantial degree, or in endorsement of its value, the formal neutrality of the scheme does not render the Establishment Clause  JX helpless or the holdings in Aguilar and Ball inapposite.  9H1 d dy7III؃  Jl  l2  Finally, there is the issue of precedent. Stare decisis is no barrier in the Court's eyes because it reads  JN Aguilar and Ball for exaggerated propositions that  J& Witters and Zobrest are supposed to have limited to the  J point of abandoned doctrine. Cf. Patterson v. McLean  J Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164, 173!174 (1989). The  J Court's dispensation from stare decisis is, accordingly, no more convincing than its reading of those cases. Since  J^ Aguilar came down, no case has held that there need be no concern about a risk that publicly paid school teachers may further religious doctrine; no case has repudiated the distinction between direct and substantial aid and aid that is indirect and incidental; no case has held that fusing public and private faculties in one religious school does not create an impermissible union or carry an impermissible endorsement; and no case has held that direct subsidization of religious education is"   constitutional or that the assumption of a portion of a religious school's teaching responsibility is not direct subsidization.  The continuity of the law, indeed, is matched by the  J` persistence of the facts. When Aguilar was decided everyone knew that providing Title I services off the premises of the religious schools would come at substantial cost in efficiency, convenience, and money. Title I had begun off the premises in New York, after all, and dissatisfaction with the arrangement was what led the City to put the public school teachers into the religious  JH schools in the first place. See Felton v. Secretary, U. S.  J Dept. of Education, 739 F.2d, at 51. When Aguilar required the end of that arrangement, conditions reverted to those of the past and they have remained unchanged: teaching conditions are often poor, it is difficult to move children around, and it costs a lot of money. That is, the facts became once again what they were once before, as everyone including the Members of this Court knew they would be. No predictions have gone so awry as to excuse the case from the claim of  J precedent, see Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U.S. 393, 412 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting), let alone excuse the Court from adhering to its own prior decision in this very case.  That is not to deny that the facts just recited are regrettable; the object of Title I is worthy without doubt, and the cost of compliance is high. In the short run there is much that is genuinely unfortunate about the  Jx administration of the scheme under Aguilar's rule. But constitutional lines have to be drawn, and on one side of every one of them is an otherwise sympathetic case that provokes impatience with the Constitution and with the line. But constitutional lines are the price of constitutional government.