Everett Public Schools, a district in Washington state with nearly 21,000 students across 27 schools, has sought to prevent its students from participating, during school hours, in off-campus Bible instruction provided by the nonprofit LifeWise. In late April, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the district from doing so, and stated that the district likely violated the nonprofit’s constitutionally protected rights to religious freedom.
“Targeting the operation of an out-of-school program just because it’s religious is a direct violation of the First Amendment,” stated Jeremy Dys, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, which is representing LifeWise.
“Religious release time programs such as LifeWise should be accessible to all families on a consistent basis,” stated Joel Penton, CEO of LifeWise Academy. “This program exists because parents in Everett and across the country are asking for it. Families see the positive impact that Bible-based character education during school hours can have on student behavior and academic performance.”
“We simply want to protect a program that is already serving dozens of local families and ensure that parental freedom is respected,” Penton stated.
According to the complaint filed by First Liberty Institute, more than 60 students from more than 40 families in the district took part in LifeWise programming. The nonprofit alleges that the district placed a more “onerous” process on it and on parents to file permission slips to the district for students’ participation than the district requires for other groups, barred it from a community resource fair at which it requested a table and declined to let it put up paper flyers in school lobbies. It also said that the district required that LifeWise materials alone must remain in sealed envelopes in student backpacks.
On April 24, the court said that the school district must, for now, let LifeWise take part in fairs, post flyers in schools (including with an image of a praying boy), use permission slips similar to other groups and let students read LifeWise materials during school time when students are reading “non-scholastic materials.”
At a Dec. 9 school district board meeting, Charles Adkins, a board member, said that weeks after the board received a letter from LifeWise, he wanted to “address the claim about whether my comments are motivated by animus toward LifeWise Academy.”
“I want to make it very, extremely, abundantly clear that yes, I do in fact hold animus toward LifeWise Academy,” he said at the meeting. “It is an organization of homophobic bullies, who are active and willing participants in the efforts to bring about an authoritarian theocracy.”
