SANTA FE INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT v. DOE

Legal Principle at Issue

Does the school district's policy permitting student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment?

Action

Affirmed (includes modified). Petitioning party did not receive a favorable disposition.

Facts/Syllabus

The Santa Fe Independent School District is a political subdivision of Texas responsible for the education of more than 4,000 students in a small community in the southern part of the state. The school district includes the Santa Fe High School, two primary schools, an intermediate school and the junior high school. Prior to 1995, a student elected as Santa Fe High School's student council chaplain delivered a prayer over the public address system before each home varsity football game for the entire season. This practice, along with others, was challenged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Respondents are two sets of current or former students and their respective mothers. One family is Mormon and the other is Catholic. The federal district court permitted respondents to litigate anonymously to protect them from intimidation or harassment.

Respondents commenced this action in April 1995 and moved for a temporary restraining order to prevent the school district from violating the Establishment Clause at the imminent graduation exercises. In their complaint, Respondents alleged that the school district had engaged in several proselytizing practices, such as promoting attendance at a Baptist revival meeting, encouraging membership in religious clubs, chastising children who held minority religious beliefs, and distributing Gideon Bibles on school premises. They also alleged that the school district allowed students to read Christian invocations and benedictions from the stage at graduation ceremonies, and to deliver overtly Christian prayers over the public address system at home football games.

While the suit was pending, Santa Fe Independent School District adopted a different policy, which authorizes two student elections, the first to determine whether "invocations" should be delivered at games, and the second to select the spokesperson to deliver them. In July, Santa Fe Independent School District enacted another policy eliminating the requirement that invocations and benedictions be "nonsectarian and non-proselytising," but also providing that if the school district were to be enjoined from enforcing that policy, the earlier policy would automatically become effective.

After the students held elections authorizing such prayers and selecting a spokesperson, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas entered an order modifying the policy to permit only nonsectarian, non-proselytizing prayer, holding that the school's "action must not 'coerce anyone to support or participate in' a religious exercise." Applying that test, the district court concluded that the graduation prayers appealed "to distinctively Christian beliefs," and that delivering a prayer "over the school's public address system prior to each football and baseball game coerces student participation in religious events." Both parties appealed, the school district contending that the enjoined portion of the October policy was permissible and the Respondents contending that both alternatives violated the Establishment Clause. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit majority agreed with the Respondents and held that, even as modified by the district court, the football prayer policy was invalid. "Regardless of whether the prayers are selected by vote or spontaneously initiated at these frequently-recurring, informal, school-sponsored events, school officials are present and have the authority to stop the prayers. . . . We therefore reverse the district court's holding." The dissenting judge rejected the majority's distinction between graduation ceremonies and football games. In his opinion the school district's policy created a limited public forum that had a secular purpose and provided neutral accommodation of non-coerced, private, religious speech.