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Opinion of the Court
the location of the public employee is neither "sensible" nor "sound," post, at 247, and the Court in Zobrest rejected it.
Nor under current law can we conclude that a program placing full-time public employees on parochial campuses to provide Title I instruction would impermissibly finance religious indoctrination. In all relevant respects, the provision of instructional services under Title I is indistinguishable from the provision of sign-language interpreters under the IDEA. Both programs make aid available only to eligible recipients. That aid is provided to students at whatever school they choose to attend. Although Title I instruction is provided to several students at once, whereas an interpreter provides translation to a single student, this distinction is not constitutionally significant. Moreover, as in Zobrest, Title I services are by law supplemental to the regular curricula. 34 CFR § 200.12(a) (1996). These services do not, therefore, "reliev[e] sectarian schools of costs they otherwise would have borne in educating their students." 509 U. S., at 12.
Justice Souter finds our conclusion that the IDEA and Title I programs are similar to be "puzzling," and points to three differences he perceives between the programs: (i) Title I services are distributed by LEA's "directly to the religious schools" instead of to individual students pursuant to a formal application process; (ii) Title I services "necessarily reliev[e] a religious school of 'an expense that it otherwise would have assumed' "; and (iii) Title I provides services to more students than did the programs in Witters and Zobrest. Post, at 251-252. None of these distinctions is meaningful. While it is true that individual students may not directly apply for Title I services, it does not follow from this premise that those services are distributed "directly to the religious schools," post, at 252. In fact, they are not. No Title I funds ever reach the coffers of religious schools, cf. Committee for Public Ed. and Religious Liberty v. Regan, 444 U. S. 646, 657-659 (1980) (involving a program giving "direct cash
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