Michigan school district to drop ban on religious handouts

By The Associated Press

08.24.01

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A Michigan school district has agreed to drop its ban on distributing religious literature on school grounds, which had been the target of a federal lawsuit by two students.

The Houghton-Portage Township district's policy, which took effect in the 1990s, forbade handing out any religious materials, including the Bible, the Torah and the Koran.

Houghton High School students Valerie Snyder and Daniel Duefrene filed suit last May, contending the ban violated their freedom of religious expression. They were represented by the Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Fla., firm that deals with religious-freedom cases.

In a settlement filed with the federal court in Marquette, the school district agreed to revise its policy to make one rule for distributing either religious material or secular material.

"I congratulate the school for taking this step instead of continuing to defend an unconstitutional policy," Liberty Counsel attorney Mathew Staver said yesterday.

The Houghton-Portage Township district had already been reviewing its regulations on religious materials and other issues when the suit was filed, said Bill Ewald, the district's attorney.

He said there had been a number of court rulings on schools and religion since the policy took effect in the 1990s. Among them: the U.S. Supreme Court's June decision in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, which found that a public school must allow religious groups to use its facilities after-hours if it allows other community groups to do the same.

Despite its policy on the literature hand-outs, the school district has allowed religious groups to meet in its buildings, Ewald said.

The controversy arose last November when a group of students tried to distribute "Student Survival Kits" at the high school. Each contained a Bible, a video, a Christian music disc and other items.

Ewald said the students were allowed to hand out the kits after classes in the school's board room. Staver, however, said that the room wasn't conveniently located, and that on one occasion the students were ordered not to distribute the kits at all.

The settlement promising a new policy was signed by U.S. District Judge Robert Holmes Bell on July 7. The two sides still need to agree on the wording of the new policy, but Staver said he expected no major problems.

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