## Facts

- Six Pennsylvania families homeschooled their children for religious reasons and sought to avoid what they viewed as a secular public-school environment.
- Pennsylvania’s home-education statute (Act 169) required parents to file annual affidavits, provide instruction in specified subjects for minimum hours/days, maintain a student portfolio (including work samples and certain standardized test results), obtain an annual evaluation by a qualified third party, and submit the portfolio and evaluation to the local superintendent for review of “appropriate education.”
- The statute did not require districts to preapprove curricula, select instructional materials, or dictate teaching methods; it set minimum educational and documentation requirements and required annual submission for compliance review.
- The families claimed the affidavit, portfolio, testing, evaluation, and superintendent-review requirements violated their federal constitutional rights to free exercise of religion and to direct the upbringing and education of their children.
- The families also claimed the statute imposed a “substantial burden” on their religious exercise under Pennsylvania’s Religious Freedom Protection Act (RFPA).
- The families objected to state oversight in general terms but did not identify a specific religious tenet that forbade recordkeeping, testing, or evaluation.

## Issues

1. Whether Act 169 violates the Free Exercise Clause by substantially burdening religious exercise, thereby requiring heightened scrutiny rather than rational-basis review.
2. Whether Act 169 is a neutral law of general applicability under Employment Division v. Smith, triggering rational-basis review.
3. Whether a “hybrid-rights” theory (free exercise combined with parental-rights doctrine) required strict scrutiny.
4. Whether the families proved, by clear and convincing evidence, that Act 169 substantially burdened religious exercise under Pennsylvania’s RFPA, and what disposition was appropriate for the RFPA claim.

## Decision

- The Third Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the school districts on the federal constitutional claims.
- The court held Act 169 is neutral and generally applicable and therefore is evaluated under rational-basis review.
- The court held the families did not show a federally cognizable “substantial burden” on religious exercise because they failed to identify a specific religious tenet that Act 169 compelled them to violate or prohibited them from practicing.
- The court declined to apply strict scrutiny under a hybrid-rights theory because the parental-rights component was not independently viable on the facts presented.
- The court concluded the families did not establish a “substantial burden” under RFPA by clear and convincing evidence.
- Because RFPA raised novel and unresolved state-law questions, the court remanded the RFPA claim to state court for further proceedings.

## Legal Principles

- A law that is facially neutral toward religion and generally applicable to regulated conduct is governed by rational-basis review under the federal Free Exercise Clause.
- A federal free-exercise “substantial burden” generally requires coercion to violate a specific religious belief or prohibition of conduct mandated by religion; generalized objections to government oversight are insufficient.
- “Hybrid-rights” arguments do not trigger strict scrutiny unless the accompanying non–free-exercise claim is independently viable and seriously implicated.
- Under Pennsylvania’s RFPA, plaintiffs must prove a “substantial burden” on religious exercise by clear and convincing evidence before the government must justify its action under a compelling-interest/least-restrictive-means test.
- Federal courts may remand state statutory claims presenting novel state-law issues when federal claims are resolved and state-law interpretation remains unsettled.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit upheld Pennsylvania’s homeschool reporting and evaluation scheme as a neutral, generally applicable means of ensuring minimum educational standards, rejected federal free-exercise and hybrid-rights challenges for lack of a specific religious prohibition or independently viable companion right, and remanded the RFPA claim to state court due to unsettled questions of state law and an insufficient showing of substantial burden.


Combs v. Homer-Center Sch. Dist., 540 F.3d 231 (3d Cir. 2008)