High Court’s Action Clouds Issue of Student-Led Prayers

The Supreme Court on Monday added a new uncertainty to the debate over student-led prayers at public school events, as the justices let stand a Jacksonville, Fla., school board policy that allows high school seniors to elect a fellow student to deliver a “message” at graduation ceremonies.

After the Supreme Court in 1992 struck down school-sponsored prayers at graduation ceremonies, Jacksonville adopted a policy that allowed students, rather than school officials, to decide the issue. Since then, 58 of 62 senior classes at schools in Duval County have often had a student “chaplain,” chosen by other members of the class, deliver an invocation.

Nonetheless, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld the school board policy, saying that it did not endorse religion.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union appealed that conclusion to the high court, but they were turned down without comment Monday.

The action was surprising because the high court, on a 6-3 vote, struck down a similar school board policy in Texas last year. In the small east Texas town of Santa Fe, the school board told seniors they could elect one student to deliver a “statement or invocation” over the public address system at the start of the football games.

Justice John Paul Stevens, speaking for the court in that case, said the government violates the Constitution when its officials “affirmatively sponsor the particular religious practice of prayer.” While students are free to pray on their own or with their friends, school officials are not free to encourage or sponsor a group prayer, he said.

After that opinion was announced in June 2000, the Supreme Court overturned the decision from the appeals court in Atlanta on the Florida case and told its judges to reconsider their conclusion. But the appeals court, on an 8-4 vote, refused to budge and said that student-led prayers at football games in Texas were different from the student-led prayers at graduation in Florida.

As usual, the justices did not explain their reasons for rejecting the appeal in the Jacksonville case, Adler vs. Duval County, 01-287.

The court’s decision to turn away the case is not a ruling, and it has no legal impact. Nonetheless, attorneys who have followed the issue were left puzzled.

“I think it means there is one rule in the 11th Circuit, one rule in the 5th Circuit [in Texas] and no rule for the rest of the country,” said D. Gray Thomas, a Jacksonville lawyer who represented the student who challenged the policy.

For the last decade, lower courts have split over whether student-led prayers at public schools deserve protection as freedom of speech or exclusion as a government-sponsored “establishment of religion.”