ENFIELD, Conn. (ABP) — A Connecticut school board has decided not to appeal a federal judge's ruling that holding high-school graduation ceremonies at a local church is unconstitutional.
The Enfield Board of Education voted 5-4 on June 3 to reverse an April vote to hold graduations for the town's two high schools at First Cathedral, an 11,000-member mega-church originally named the First Baptist Church.
Instead the board voted to hold June 23 and June 24 graduations for Enfield High School and Enrico Fermi High School on school property, either on athletic fields or inside the gymnasium.
"Our clients are extremely pleased by this decision that honors the judge’s ruling," said Andrew Schneider, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. "We hope this puts an end to the divisive atmosphere that has prevailed in Enfield and brings certainty to the students' graduation plans."
ACLU of Connecticut, along with the national ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, represented two graduating seniors and three parents at Enfield High School in a lawsuit demanding the ceremony be held somewhere else. One of the students, described as an agnostic, and the other, who is Jewish, said they would feel uncomfortable attending their graduations in an environment full of Christian religious symbols.
U.S. District Judge Janet Hall issued an injunction May 31 ordering the graduations to a religiously neutral site.
The district started holding graduations at the 120,000 square-foot church as a temporary measure during construction projects at the two high schools. The board originally voted to move this year's exercises back to the schools but reversed the decision after the Family Institute of Connecticut, a conservative Christian group that lobbies the state government, publicized the case and framed it as a religious-liberty issue.
The judge said the flip-flop — along with the fact that other non-religious alternative sites were available — would cause a reasonable observer to perceive the school district endorsed a religion. She said further that forcing people to choose between attending a public-school ceremony amid religious imagery and missing high-school graduation ceremonies is "coercion" that violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
In the decision to move the graduations to the church, the school district asked First Cathedral to cover up a number of religious images in order to make it look less like a church. Judge Hall said it was "excessive entanglement" between church and state for the government to dictate decisions about religious matters to a church.
Vincent McCarthy, senior attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice who represented the school district, said while the board opted not to appeal the preliminary injunction, the case will continue.
"The Enfield School Board simply did not want to appeal the judge's ruling because they felt it would be too much work to prepare two facilities for graduation," McCarthy said. "They also wanted students to have certainty about the location of their commencement."
"We believe we had a strong case for an appeal," McCarthy said. "Constitutional law in this area is clear. Holding a secular event at a religious facility does not constitute an endorsement of or entanglement with religion."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
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