Principal Bryan Scott Rounds at Cardiff Junior High in Katy, Texas, is fighting tooth and nail to prevent a teacher from praying where students might see her, including outside the school. (I wonder whether he wants to protect girls from seeing boys in their restrooms.)
After Rounds barred math teacher Staci Barber from praying on campus, she filed a lawsuit on religious freedom grounds. A district court denied Rounds’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The court contended that the prohibition violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Barber’s legal counsel, reported that the defeated principal appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which heard the case last Friday.
ACLJ cited Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), a landmark Supreme Court case, to support its argument. Kennedy involved a high school football coach in Washington who prayed with players on the 50-yard line after games. The school asked Coach Joe Kennedy to stop, but he refused. The school decided not to renew his contract. He filed a lawsuit.
The high court ruled in Kennedy’s favor. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote (PDF) that the school sought to punish Kennedy “based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
ACLJ noted that Barber was not proselytizing or leading students in prayer. But she has a right to live out her faith, even in a government school.
Photo credit: ACLJ
