252
Souter, J., dissenting
ics, English as a second language) and provided guidance services. See Aguilar, supra, 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 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 from private decisionmaking, a public educational agency distributes Title I aid in the form of programs and services directly to the religious schools. In Zobrest and 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 Title I funds.3 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 significant feature of the system, see Wolman v. Walter, 433 U. S., at 264 (opinion of Powell, J.)).
In sum, nothing since Ball and Aguilar and before this litigation has eroded the distinction between "direct and substantial" and "indirect and incidental." That principled line is being breached only here and now.
3 For this reason, the Court's attempted analogy between Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act fails, see ante, at 228; James Zobrest, unlike students receiving Title I services, applied individually for the interpretative services at issue in Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School Dist., 509 U. S. 1, 4 (1993).
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