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The Supreme Court’s term is already chock full of cases with culture war implications: pornography and the First Amendment, gender-affirming care for minors, Medicaid restrictions on abortion, ghost gun regulation, and more. But despite its already high-profile docket, the Court agreed on January 17 to weigh in on yet another case certain to draw national attention. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court will consider whether the Montgomery County Board of Education, the largest school district in Maryland, burdened the free exercise rights of a group of religious parents when it removed parental notice and opt-outs for instruction on sexuality and gender identity for children as young as three and four years old.

Parental litigation over school policies is often rooted in the Supreme Court’s substantive due process analysis, particularly the progeny of Meyer v. Nebraska. In Meyer, the Supreme Court invalidated a state law requiring all public school instruction to be in English as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s liberty interest of parents to “control the education of their own.”

Later, in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Court invalidated a state law requiring children to attend school beyond the eighth grade, holding that it violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment as it interfered with the parents’ constitutional right to direct the religious upbringing of their children.

But there are some categories of educational decisions in which parents do not have a cognizable constitutional interest. For example, parental rights as traditionally recognized by the Supreme Court are comparatively weaker in matters of substantive curriculum or school administration. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recognized in Gruenke v. Seip, “Notwithstanding [its] near-absolutist pronouncements, the [Supreme] Court has also recognized that for some portions of the day, children are in the compulsory custody of state-operated school systems. In that setting, the state’s power is ‘custodial and tutelary, permitting a degree of supervision and control that could not be exercised over free adults.’”

Curricular opt-out rights are governed by state and local policies, and they are generally limited to narrow categories of instruction. For example, 47 states and the District of Columbia allow parents to opt out of sex education. But no state has gone so far as to bar opt-out overall.

In a situation where classroom instruction clashes with a family’s religious beliefs, does the school’s or the parents’ interest prevail?

The petitioner parents in Mahmoud—including Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims—are not challenging the Montgomery County curriculum. They argue only that the district’s compulsion of their elementary-age children to participate in instruction contrary to their convictions violates the Free Exercise Clause. In the litigation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit narrowly construed Wisconsin v. Yoder, finding no free-exercise burden because no parent or child was forced “to change their religious beliefs or conduct.”

That holding conflicts with the Supreme Court’s extensive First Amendment jurisprudence on religious exercise, and with Wisconsin v. Yoder itself, which held that “the fundamental interest of parents to guide the religious future and education of their children” is “now established beyond debate.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in this case will finally settle a circuit split on a highly contentious issue, especially in an era of continuing discord over the parameters of “parental rights.” Five federal circuits hold that forced participation in public school instruction cannot alone burden free exercise absent some “coercive effect,” and that Wisconsin v. Yoder provides parents no protection for their religious beliefs once they place their children in the public school system. But the Eighth Circuit stands alone in holding that forced participation in public school instruction can, by itself, burden religious liberty under the Free Exercise clause.

As Judge Quattlebaum recognized in dissent from the Fourth Circuit’s decision to deny the parents in Mahmoud a preliminary injunction, “burdening the exercise of religion is not limited to direct coercion . . . [religious liberty] may be infringed by the denial of or placing of conditions upon a benefit or privilege.” The Montgomery County School Board’s no-opt-out policy forced parents, Quattlebaum wrote, “to either live out their faith or forego the public benefit.”

Based on its extensive recent history of rulings protecting the free exercise right, it would seem the Supreme Court is likely to agree.