WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Supreme Court declined April 24 to hear a case that pits an elementary school student's religious and speech rights against her school district's responsibility to not endorse Christianity.
The justices declined, without comment, to hear the Baldwinsville Central School District's appeal of a 2005 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Manhattan-based court had ordered a lower court to review the case of a kindergarten student who drew a picture of Jesus in response to a class assignment to create a poster about the environment. The school refused to display the child's work alongside those of her classmates.
Her parents sued the school district, citing viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. While the federal district court initially dismissed their case, the 2nd Circuit ordered the court to re-examine it, saying the decision smacked of discrimination. The appeals panel ordered the district court to determine whether the school district indeed discriminated against the child's viewpoint and, if so, whether it could be justified by a compelling government interest.
The school district argued the decision rested on a principle unsettled as a matter of case law. Other federal appeals courts have reached differing conclusions on whether schools may censor individual student religious speech when that speech occurs in a forum that may imply school endorsement.
If the justices had accepted the case, it would have offered them an opportunity to break new ground on questions of religious freedom and free speech for public elementary school students. Most of the few times the court has addressed those topics, it has been in the context of high schools.
But the court rarely agrees to hear appeals in cases that have not reached their final decision in lower federal courts. School attorneys have argued the 2nd Circuit's decision left the door open for litigious parents to file frivolous lawsuits over any number of perceived slights at the hands of school officials.
The case is Baldwinsville Central School District v. Peck, No. 05-899.
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