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Headings: Religion’s Legal Place in the Schoolhouse
Religion’s Legal Place in the Schoolhouse
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Content: Constitutional Backing
The First Amendment provides the backdrop for the relationship between religious practice and government conduct. As part of the Bill of Rights, it was designed to ensure that the government would not infringe upon certain inalienable rights of private citizens. Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has emphasized how to properly navigate the intersection of the Establishment, Free Exercise and Free Speech clauses of the First Amendment by noting in the landmark 1990 case of Westside Community Board of Education v. Mergens, “There is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses protect.” The Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment applies to all federal, state and local government actors, including public schools and their employees. In a landmark 1969 case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, the court noted: “ First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” This is why the term “separation of church and state”— which appears nowhere in the Constitution — is a misleading description of what the First Amendment requires. The First Amendment’s protection of the religious expression of private individuals, including public school students, neither permits nor requires public school officials to make their schools “religion-free” zones. In the public school context, the First Amendment dictates official school policies that implicate religion are treated differently than student religious expression.