Federal appeals panel sides with student Bible club leader

By The Associated Press

09.10.02

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SEATTLE — A federal appeals court panel has ruled that the Bethel School District violated a Bible club leader's rights by refusing to give the organization the same status and benefits granted to other school groups.

Yesterday's ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court's dismissal of a complaint filed four years ago by Tausha Prince, then a sophomore at Spanaway Lake High School about 35 miles south of Seattle.

Prince argued that the school district violated her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion, as well as the Equal Access Act, a 1984 law forbidding public schools that take federal money from excluding religious or political extracurricular clubs if they allow others.

"I'm thrilled," Prince, 19, said after the ruling. "It took a long time, but it was worth the wait."

Officials with the Bethel School District, southeast of Tacoma, maintained that they allowed Prince and her classmates in World Changers to meet at school by establishing a separate category of student-run religious organizations.

"We greatly value diversity and we believe strongly in First Amendment rights," said district spokesman Mark Wenzel. "However, the Equal Access Act instructs school districts to remain uninvolved in student-initiated religious groups. Therefore, it was a question of First Amendment rights and a separation of church and state. And the district court initially found in our favor, so we feel that we were not unjustified."

"We respect the appeals court decision," Wenzel added, "and we'll take this to the school board to decide further action."

A decision on whether the district will appeal is expected later this month, Wenzel said.

Prince — now a junior at Whitworth College in Spokane — asked the school district for permission to form World Changers in the fall of 1997, but officials said that because it was a religious club, it could not be set up as a regular student group.

That meant World Changers did not have access to Associated Student Body funds for club activities. Members could not make announcements over the school's public address system, and they were limited to posting fliers on one bulletin board rather than throughout the school.

Prince and her parents filed their complaint in U.S. District Court in Tacoma in February 1998, naming the school district, then-Superintendent Jill Jacoby, Spanaway Lake High School Principal Tim Sherry and Assistant Principal Bonnie Kenigson as defendants.

The following April, U.S. District Judge Franklin D. Burgess dismissed the complaint, granting summary judgment to the defendants.

The district had argued that granting a religious group the same status as secular groups would "destroy the careful balance between the free speech and establishment clauses of the First Amendment," according to court documents.

The 9th Circuit heard Prince's appeal of Burgess' ruling in July 2001.

Yesterday's decision in Prince v. Jacoby, filed in San Francisco, was 2-1, with one judge partially concurring and partially dissenting.

Walter Weber, a lawyer with the American Center for Law and Justice and one of Prince's attorneys, argued that the Bethel School District and others across the country have misunderstood the law when it comes to religious student groups.

"There seems to be a lot of residual resistance to the concept of the Equal Access Act," Weber said yesterday from his office in Virginia Beach, Va. "Schools are overreacting. Rather than not just engaging in religious practices — like teachers leading students in prayer — instead, they're mistakenly feeling they're required to eliminate religious activity from schools altogether. Breaking them of that bad habit is taking a lot of time."

World Changers no longer exists. Students at nearby Bethel High School run a Bible club, but Wenzel said he did not know whether that organization had sought status as an official Associated Student Body group.

Meanwhile, Prince says she's working on starting up a Bible club at Whitworth — a Presbyterian school.

"I don't anticipate any problems," she said.

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