Freethought-Now

At the Freedom From Religion Foundation, we’re used to court cases taking years to wend their way through the court system before we can (hopefully) declare final victory. Once a case is closed, it usually stays that way — but not always.

In the fall of 2014, FFRF and nearly 20 parents and students sued the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education in California. We eventually had to turn away prospective plaintiffs. Why did so many folks there ask us to sue? Because the board’s public meetings resembled a church service. Board members were proselytizing students and other attendees during meetings, urging everyone to follow and believe in Jesus Christ. The board also opened its meetings with invocations, led by clergy members (who received long hagiographic introductions) or by board members themselves. The invocations were always overtly religious, and they preached a specific conservative evangelical version of Christianity.

The board’s years-long proselytizing and prayers violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The district court (the trial-level court) ruled in favor of FFRF and the parents and students whose rights the board continued to violate. The board appealed, and in July 2018, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over California, ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor again. The appeals court declared that the board’s invocation practice was unconstitutional and upheld the district court’s injunction preventing the board from continuing its illegal prayer practice. The board was also ordered to pay the plaintiffs’ attorneys (that is, FFRF itself and its outside counsel) roughly $275,000 in fees.

When the case closed in 2018, we at FFRF and the plaintiffs breathed a sigh of relief. The parents and students who fought for years to secure their constitutional rights were able to carry on with their lives knowing that their school board wouldn’t resume its unconstitutional prayers. The case was finally over — or so we all thought.

Fast forward over half a decade. It’s 2025, and the Chino Valley Board decides to try a final Hail Mary. That July, the board filed a motion asking the court to toss out the order that prohibits the board from opening its meetings with prayer. The board’s only basis for its long-shot motion is a nonsense argument that the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District completely upended the legal basis for the district court’s original decision. The board also argues that history supports the idea that public school boards can open meetings with prayer. These arguments are wrong for several reasons.

To quickly recap, the Kennedy case was about an assistant high school football coach, Joe Kennedy, praying on the 50-yard line after football games. The school argued that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause required it to stop Kennedy’s post-game prayers because they constituted school endorsement of religion. In an unsurprising ruling from the pro-Christianity Roberts Court, the Supreme Court held that the school district violated Kennedy’s Free Speech and Free Exercise rights, and that Kennedy was entitled to recite a short “private,” “quiet” prayer by himself on the football field after games. The court also stated that Kennedy didn’t encourage or coerce students to join his prayers. Significantly, even though the Supreme Court bought into a false narrative, given the coach’s long history of praying with students, the opinion reaffirmed that coercion, among other practices, is still clearly prohibited by the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Finally, the court abandoned the “Lemon Test,” the previous analytical framework courts used to decide whether a government action violated the Establishment Clause. Instead of the Lemon Test, courts now have to evaluate the Establishment Clause based on a “historically sensitive” understanding of what it means.

Since 2022, too much ink has been spilled by lawyers, scholars, judges and commentators about what the Kennedy case does or doesn’t mean. One thing that’s clear is  the Supreme Court didn’t intend to overrule every case that cited or used the now-defunct Lemon Test. How do we know that? Well, in the Kennedy opinion, the Supreme Court approvingly cited numerous cases that relied in part on Lemon, and has since favorably cited some of those same cases in opinions. The Chino Valley Board’s argument that Kennedy overruled every case that cites Lemon is just wrong.

There’s also no accepted historical practice of public school boards opening their meetings with prayer. The Chino Valley Board has tried to make hay out of a handful of misleading, cherry-picked “historical” examples of governing bodies that kind of resemble school boards opening their meetings with prayer. The random, out-of-context examples don’t prove that the Framers of the Constitution thought public school boards opening their meetings with prayer was constitutional, especially since public school boards didn’t even exist when our country was founded.

In October 2025, the district court denied the board’s half-baked motion and issued a decision (again) in FFRF’s favor. To begin, the board failed to explain to the judge how or why its motion met several necessary technical requirements under the rules that govern federal civil cases. The district court rightly concluded the board’s motion to throw out the injunction against its illegal prayer practice didn’t meet those requirements. Regardless of legal technicalities, the judge also determined that the board’s argument fails on the merits. The district court agreed with us that the board’s argument that the Kennedy decision completely undermined the injunction is meritless, and the few “historical” examples of alleged school board prayer are as unpersuasive as they are misleading.

It’s important to remember that the board is racking up a potentially enormous bill by reviving this long-closed case, all in an effort to resume its unconstitutional prayer practice. After winning (again) in the district court last fall, FFRF and our co-counsel asked for and were granted an award of over $130,000 in attorneys’ fees. That’s taxpayer money the board is throwing away because the members are hellbent on violating students’ First Amendment rights.

Of course, the board has appealed the district court’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the briefing on appeal is still ongoing. While we’re confident in our chances of ultimately winning this case, this situation should serve as a reminder of the importance of electing school board candidates who believe in the First Amendment. The only reason the Chino Valley case was resurrected is that Christian extremists retook the board and voted to reopen litigation despite the cost and the law being stacked against them. The board should be focused on doing its actual job and ensuring students receive a quality education, but instead is dumping time — and potentially a huge amount of money — into frivolous and harmful litigation.

Chino Valley School Board members need to value their duty to uphold the Establishment Clause law protecting students’ rights over a religious crusade.

Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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