Texas school district settles lawsuit over Bible curriculum
A West Texas school district has agreed to change the curriculum for a high school course on the Bible to settle a lawsuit that said it amounted to religious indoctrination. The federal suit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the People for the American Way Foundation on behalf of eight parents in the Odessa area. It argued that the course curriculum, adopted in 2005 by the Ector County Independent School District, promoted Protestant Christianity and a specific reading of the Bible as a literal historical document. As part of the settlement, the district agreed to use a new curriculum developed by a committee of local educators. “It’s great that the two parties were able to come together and work out a solution,” the district’s interim superintendent, Hector Mendez, said. Jeremy Gunn, the director of the ACLU’s program on freedom of religion and belief, pointed out the settlement was not a judicial ruling that would bind other school districts, but he expected it to be “a serious wake-up call” to those considering using the same curriculum. “Anyone who is paying attention would realize that it’s very risky to teach the course, because it is unconstitutional,” Dr. Gunn said. In the original complaint filed last May, the plaintiffs said the district established the elective Bible course through a process that was “improperly designed to promote religious instruction.” The complaint said that the district empanelled a committee to research a suitable instructional model, and that the panel overwhelmingly endorsed the Bible Literacy Project curriculum, whose approach is secular and widely used in other districts. But the school board chose materials from the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. The suit asserted that the council did not teach the Bible in an objective way. The council says on its Web site that its materials are taught in 430 school districts in 37 states. When the Ector County district approved the council’s curriculum, the suit said, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction, Shannon Baker, celebrated the decision in an e-mail message, which read in part, “Take that, you dang heathens!” According to the suit, the course material treated “the story of the creation, the life of Noah and his ark,” among other things, as accurate historical statements.
Source: New York Times, 3/6/08, By Neela Banerjee
[Editor’s Note: For background on the suit, see below.]
NSBA School Law pages on Ector County Bible course lawsuit