School District to Undergo Religious Liberty Training After Forcing Students to Hide Bibles
A Washington state school district has agreed to publicly apologize and undergo religious liberty training as part of a settlement with a religious release time organization. The school district in Everett, Washington, was sued after directing elementary school students to hide their Bibles as well as conceal any materials received by the Christian organization in envelopes. The district will also pay $275,000 in attorney’s fees.
According to First Liberty, the legal group representing LifeWise Academy, a school board member previously accused LifeWise of making efforts to “turn our nation into a fascist theocracy.” The member, Charles Adkins, also declared, “I want to make it very, extremely, abundantly clear, that yes, I do in fact hold animus toward LifeWise Academy.”
The school district said in its apology, in part: “The District recognizes that comments made at various Board meetings that concerned LifeWise, including by Directors, were offensive and hurtful to the families participating in LifeWise programming. For that, the District and its Board of Directors offer a sincere apology. We recognize that these statements negatively affected the exercise of your faith. The District values the rights of all families to raise their children according to their own religious beliefs. We further apologize to any students or families that were made to feel by these comments that your religious beliefs are unworthy of respect.”
Joel Penton, founder and CEO of LifeWise Academy, discussed the matter with Fox News. “I also heard from parents that their children felt like they were being told they had to hide their faith when they were told they had to put their Bibles and things in envelopes as though it was something to be ashamed of, and I know that was very hurtful as well,” he said.
“Then the school board changed some of their policies in some ways that were pretty transparently discriminatory and infringed on the religious liberty of our program there,” Penton explained. “And some of those policy changes included requiring parents, instead of simply signing a permission slip one time for the entire semester, the entire year, they were requiring them to hand-bring in a permission slip each and every week, which was quite onerous.”
He went on to describe students being told that “if they received any worksheets or even a Bible at our program, when they came back to the school, that those had to come back in sealed envelopes so that other students wouldn’t be exposed to them.”