Despite legal rulings, California school district tries to revive Christian prayers at meetings
Chino Valley officials say a legal loophole allows them to bring Christianity back into school governance
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For years now, one public school district in California, where a majority of board members come from the same Christian megachurch, have been doing everything they can to inject their faith into the system. And for years now, the courts have stopped them.
But with the current administration and the Supreme Court bending over backwards to appease conservatives no matter what it means for the rule of law, the district is trying once again to integrate religion into their public duties.
To understand what’s happening, you need to go back a full decade. Just consider these paragraphs from a 2015 Reveal article about the overlap between the megachurch run by Pastor Jack Hibbs and the members (at the time) of the Chino Valley Unified School District board:
Bible verses, calls to accept Jesus and the promise of eternal life can be heard in two disparate places in a southeastern suburb of Los Angeles: the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills megachurch and the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education.
Three of the five school board members worship at the evangelical church on Sundays; two of them continue praying and preaching during the board meetings on Thursdays.
…
Getting the blessing of the giant church, which says it has 8,000 registered voters, matters in the Chino Valley school district, where the highest vote-getter in the [recent] board election received 11,341 votes.
The reporter, Amy Julia Harris, wrote about how three of the five Board members—Andrew Cruz, James Na, and Sylvia Orozco—were all members of Hibbs’ church and were using their power to turn meetings into religious revivals, full of explicitly Christian prayers and Bible verses and rants against gay marriage.
Harris also wrote about the megachurch’s involvement in the school board races. For example, Hibbs endorsed Na when he ran for re-election…
… and the church “asked all the school board candidates what they thought about a ban on abortion and Jews’ right to Israel and their views on marriage,” even though those questions were irrelevant when it came to a school board race. Their responses, however, were distributed among the congregation. (In theory, the Johnson Amendment prohibits this sort of endorsement, but conservative Christians have routinely ignored that rule with no consequences, and the IRS under the Trump administration now says it won’t enforce the rule at all, saying out loud what they were always doing quietly.)
The church’s social media also praised Na when he introduced a program to bring the Bible into public schools.
As the Reveal article noted,
The Chino Hills congregation heavily lobbied the school district to get the Bible course approved as an elective for seniors. Church members raised and donated $4,326 to the school district to pay for the 75 textbooks for the class, according to Chino’s Champion Newspapers.
The proposal for the Bible class came as the district was facing a potential $30 million deficit and was slashing some of its more rigorous course offerings, according to local news reports.
Na was also accused of using his position to try and recruit a student in the district to attend Hibbs’ church.
The end result was that, while the church-endorsed candidates didn’t always win, they won enough times to make a difference. In the case of Chino Valley, Harris wrote, the church-backed majority “passed a resolution opposing same-sex marriage in 2008, spearheaded a Bible class as an elective several years ago and opposed a state law intended to protect transgender public school students.”
The point is: The megachurch’s involvement in this particular school district has been a problem for well over a decade and the school board has tried everything to turn its meetings into church services.
Because of this, they were sued by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2014, well before the media began to pay attention.
FFRF said in its lawsuit that Chino Valley board gatherings “resemble a church service more than a school board meeting.” In 2016, a district court ruled in FFRF’s favor and said that board’s prayer resolution and constant proselytizing at meetings “constitute unconstitutional government endorsements of religion in violation of Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.” The Board was on the hook for over $200,000 in FFRF’s legal fees.
Good news, right?
But it didn’t end there because the board voted to appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit. In 2018, that court weighed in and said… exactly the same thing: The school-sponsored prayers at Board meetings were still unconstitutional.
Good news, right?
But it didn’t end there because the board voted to appeal the decision to the entire Ninth Circuit. But in late 2018, the Court denied that appeal.
That left only one option: Asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn those decisions.
There was just one problem. The school board was now composed of different people. Orozco decided not to run again, and the new board voted 3-2 not to appeal the case any further. They were finally admitting defeat, agreeing to take the loss, pay the fees, and be done with this.
The entire charade cost the district over $282,000.
That move in a more sensible direction, however, didn’t last very long. The prayers were no longer at meetings, but in 2022, conservatives regained control of the Board after a woman named Sonja Shaw won her seat—by a mere 317 votes—to give Calvary Chapel members a majority once again (alongside Andrew Cruz and James Na).
Shaw soon became the Board’s president and pushed for more conservative policies than ever before. They cozied up to right-wing extremists groups like Gays Against Groomers and passed a resolution supporting a bill that would “out” trans kids to their parents if they identified as a gender that wasn’t declared on their birth certificates. When one high school counselor proposed building a private office in its wellness center for mental health breaks, Shaw declared such a space could become a Planed Parenthood clinic, a move that dissuaded one group from fundraising for the project and led to a harassment campaign against school staffers.
Today, while some of the names are different, the Chino Valley Unified School Board is 100% made up of conservative zealots. One thing they have not done, however, is bring prayer back into their meetings. They can’t. They literally lost the legal case involving those prayers.
But this past February, the Board voted 4-0 (with one conservative member absent) to allow the right-wing legal group Advocates for Faith and Freedom to try and resurrect their old case.
Could they do that? According to their lawyers, the Supreme Court’s 2022 Kennedy case—the one involving a selfish, showboating football coach who wanted to pray at midfield after games—killed off the Lemon Test, which was a straightforward way to see if certain laws violated church/state separation. Since that test was no longer in effect, the conservative lawyers claimed, church/state separation was also effectively dead, therefore school board meetings could have Christian prayers because it’s just tradition.
(None of that makes any sense. Church/state separation is very much still in effect. But that was the argument they were going with.)
Last Thursday, that conservative legal group filed a formal request to the U.S. District Court in central California to revive the old case given what the Supreme Court has said in the intervening years, allowing them to inject Christian prayers back into their meetings.
The law on which the injunction was based has since been overturned by the Supreme Court… The Board, which consists of several new members, now desires to implement a policy allowing for invocations to start school board meetings that comply with the history and tradition of invocations prior to public meetings of deliberative bodies and, in particular, of school boards. As a result, CVUSD requests this Court vacate the injunction in the present matter and permits the new board to create a policy that permits an invocation to be done prior to board meetings in a manner that comports with current law.
If they succeed, it would likely lead to countless public school districts shoving Christianity into their meetings by way of an invocation. While the Supreme Court has said city councils may have invocations, provided they’re open to people of all faiths and no religious faith, that privilege has not extended to school boards, where children may be present.
What Chino Valley’s Board wants to do is expose kids to their preferred religion with no regard for people who don’t share their religion.
FFRF says it will continue to fight this case:
The board’s latest move is a troubling effort to defy longstanding constitutional protections and reintroduce religious coercion into public meetings. FFRF remains steadfast and committed to ensuring that Chino Valley residents, regardless of belief or nonbelief, are free from school board-imposed religious ritual and proselytizing. The state/church watchdog will file a forthcoming response to the board’s motion and seek to keep the injunction in place.
There’s no reason judges should see it any differently. Even if the Lemon Test is dead, church/state separation is very much alive and there’s no “tradition” that backs Christian invocations at public school board meetings. To begin with, it’s not like we had a public school system at our nation’s founding. Our nation has also become far more religiously diverse since then.
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. This is what happens when Christians who don’t give a damn about kids take over a public school district. It’s chaos for those who don’t believe that one conservative evangelical megachurch should guide school board policies.
Unfortunately, when board members are guided by religious zealotry, this is what they’re going to waste their time fighting for.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
The phrase: "pissing into the wind" comes to mind as regards this situation. The Chino Valley Unified School District seems to be bound and determined to reintroduce prayer into what should be a secular function, mostly because a majority of the members seem to have a church and a radical pastor in common. These people need to be reminded that THE POPULATION OF CHINO IS NOT NECESSARILY ALL CHRISTIAN! More than likely, there is a Jewish, Mormon, Islamic, and, yes, atheistic component to the people of Chino, and they do not deserve to be relegated to second-class status because the school board wants to get their Jesus on.
Those members won't hear that, though ... or at least not until the FFRF hammers it into their skulls.
They could not, of course, provide a shred of evidence to support their claim these meetings derive a bit of good by including prayer. They're doing what the religious right always does and trying to force their religion on others. They do this in spite of the fact they would go out of their tiny little minds if any prayer other than those they approve of were to be used. Mixing religion and government is the same terrible idea it has always been, and the public schools are a sub-division of government.