ly, the existence of other suitable graduation sites – if the District approved of the Church’s message.”
After last week’s decision allowing prayer before town meetings (which we covered in an FR Alert), one might have expected the Supreme Court to take up (and even reverse) the Seventh Circuit’s decision. But the Court declined to even hear the appeal.
In a relatively uncommon step, Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented from the Court’s denial of review in the case. Scalia compared the complaints of non-Christian parents about holding graduation ceremonies in churches to his own dislike for the public playing of “rock music and Stravinsky,” and expressed his belief that based on prior Supreme Court precedent, such an aversion “cannot be imposed by law because of the First Amendment.” In other words, according to Scalia and Thomas the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not even apply to, let alone prohibit, holding graduation ceremonies in churches. Scalia argued that because the Seventh Circuit’s decision was en banc (before all the judges of the Seventh Circuit), prompted three powerful dissents, conflicted with decisions that have long allowed graduation ceremonies to take place in churches, and conflicted with decisions upholding other public uses of religious spaces, Supreme Court review should have been granted.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case means the Seventh Circuit’s decision remains good law, and binding law for school districts in its jurisdiction. Notably, the decision does not hold that a graduation ceremony may never be held in a church or other religious building. Rather, the decision cautions against such proceedings being held in a location with the “sheer religiosity” of the church in question in the case. As our previous summary explained:
[T]he church . . . had a 15-20 foot tall cross at the front of the sanctuary, as well as Bibles and hymnals in the pews and religious literature in the lobby, including signs and pamphlets targeted at children. Some years, church members staffed the information booths and/or distributed religious literature.”
The reality of the decision, however, is that it is legally risky to hold a graduation ceremony in any church, and so caution is warranted by schools considering doing so. At the very least, review of the question by legal counsel is imperative.
By Guest Blogger Amy Kosanovich Dickerson
School leaders across the country are buzzing about a California Superior Court’s recent tentative ruling that the state’s teacher tenure, dismissal, and layoff laws violate the equal protection clause of the California Constitution. As can be seen in the analyses in the Chicago Tribune, Politico and Education Week, education and news groups are also speculating about the ruling’s significance for California and other states throughout the country. Below is a brief summary of the decision and its potential implications for states across the country, including Illinois.
The Court’s Decision
In Vergara v. State of California, nine California public school students, supported by the group Students Matter, claimed that the state’s teacher tenure, dismissal and layoff statutes result in “grossly ineffective teachers” obtaining and retaining permanent employment, and that these teachers are disproportionately employed in schools serving predominantly low-income and minority students, in violation of the equal protection clause of the California Constitution. The court agreed with the students, finding that the statutes violate students’ fundamental rights to equal education “by adversely affecting the quality of education they are afforded by the state.” The court’s opinion references a significant amount of testimony presented at trial on these adverse effects, including testimony that 1-3% of teachers in California, or 2,750-8,250 teachers, are “grossly ineffective.”
In finding the state’s teacher tenure law unconstitutional, the court took particular issue with the fact that a California public school teacher may attain tenure in only 