Judge shuts down California school district's attempt to revive Christian prayers at meetings
After years of trying to turn board meetings into church services, the Chino Valley Unified School District's latest lawsuit has died in disgrace
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A California school district overrun with religious zealots on the board of education attempted to integrate religion into their meetings. But a federal judge has thankfully rejected their plea.
(I first wrote about this situation a couple of months ago but because of the update, I’m reposting that story here with the relevant new information.)
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 made up entirely 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, the reasoning used by the Ninth Circuit was null and void, therefore school board meetings could have Christian prayers because it was just tradition.
(None of that made any sense. Church/state separation was very much still in effect. But that was the argument they were going with.)
In July, 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 succeeded, 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 said it would 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.
Thankfully, on Monday, that’s exactly what a judge said.
U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal wrote that he didn’t even need a hearing to make his decision. The facts of the case spoke for themselves.
For example, why did the school board wait until now to file this case?
Defendants waited over three years after Kennedy to file this Motion… Defendants provide no reason, let alone “exceptional circumstances,” to justify this three-year delay… Defendants were aware of the Kennedy decision, on which basis they bring this Motion, and inexplicably waited three years prior to filing this Motion.
He added that the three-year delay required FFRF to hire new local attorneys to familiarize themselves with a case they believed to be over. In short, though, the judge said the case wasn’t filed in a “reasonable time” period. You don’t get to re-litigate a case you lost just because you’re sore losers.
That may be procedural, but the school board lost on the merits, too. Judge Bernal said that the Kennedy ruling didn’t change anything about the law in question: “Kennedy, while overturning Lemon, does not undermine the validity of either the Order or the Opinion.” That’s because the earlier rulings were blatant violations of church/state separation regardless of which laws the school board cited in their defense.
Thus, even though this Court relied on Lemon, it correctly focused on the coercive nature of Defendants’ prayer policy. Nothing in Kennedy persuades this Court that the Supreme Court intended to overrule its line of school prayer cases banning “prayer involving public school students” that is “problematically coercive.”
Want to look at history as the guiding light here? Well, too bad, because there’s no historical practice of school board invocations. Pushing prayers on kids violates the Establishment Clause, plain and simple.
The bottom line: “The Court finds that Defendants have not articulated a sufficient basis for relief…”
The ruling means prayers remain banned at Chino Valley Unified School District board meetings because school board members still need to do their damn jobs.
FFRF now says they plan to go after the school board for legal fees for wasting their time… again.
“We are so pleased that reason and our secular Constitution have prevailed here, and that the families in this school district will not have to endure coercive prayers in order to attend school board meetings,” comments Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president.
… “The district fails to protect taxpayer money as long as it continues to pursue this renewed attempt to coerce families to engage in prayer,” adds Gaylor.
That’s the right outcome and hopefully a lesson for those board members who are more interested in spreading Christianity and wasting taxpayer dollars than helping students.
This decision doesn’t just mark a legal victory. It’s a strong rebuke of theocratic overreach. The Chino Valley Unified School Board has spent a decade using their power to push an evangelical agenda that has no place in a public institution. Their lawsuit was never about “tradition.” It was about their ability to preach, intimidate, and erase the line between church and state that protects everyone’s freedom of belief. The judge saw through the charade, called out their delay for what it was—a desperate, hollow stunt that required a conservative majority—and reaffirmed that no amount of revisionist history can justify what is, at its core, unconstitutional coercion.
Let that be a lesson for any other school district that wants to play the same game. School boards aren’t your pulpit. It shouldn’t take a judge to remind us of that, but neither the board members nor the fools who voted for them seem to understand how public schools should operate.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
Hope FFRF wins. All of these board members should be personally liable. Economic pain is the only way to make zealots pay attention.
𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒-𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑎 𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑠.
And yet, here we are. The Christian Nazionalists will push and push and push to do everything they can to eliminate true religious freedom. And attempts to re-litigate cases they lost are straight from Dear Leader's playbook.