A California state court judge has ruled that a school district’s twice-a-week yoga program for its students passes Constitutional muster and is exercise, not religious indoctrination. In short, the program falls in line with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The Encinitas Union School District (EUSD) came under fire in the fall of 2012 after it accepted a grant from the Jois Foundation’s $533,000, which was used to fund and establish Ashtanga yoga classes in EUSD elementary schools.
Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock, who were parents of children in the school district, complained, charging that the district was forcing religion on the students. Several hearings were held, none of which brought satisfaction to the Sedlocks.
Last spring, attorneys for the National Center For Law & Policy (NCLP) took on the Sedlocks as clients and sued the school district, adopting a two-pronged strategy. It sought a writ of mandate and injunctive relief to order the EUSD to comply with the California Constitution’s religious freedom provisions as well as a state education statue requiring EUSD to provide a mandatory minimum number of physical education minutes.
The NCLP represents petitioners and plaintiffs Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock and their minor children, who are students in the district.
They alleged that the district was providing a “religiously-based organization (with) access to its young and impressible students to test and prove the feasibility of Jois’ ‘health and wellness’ Ashtanga yoga curriculum.”
The plaintiffs further submitted a declaration from Harvard-educated religious studies Professor Candy Gunther Brown, Ph.D., who claimed that the Ashtanga yoga program “is inherently and pervasively religious, having its roots firmly planted in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Western Metaphysical religious beliefs and practices. As such, the program violates California Constitutional provisions prohibiting government religious preference and religious discrimination (article I, § 4), prohibiting use of state resources to support religion (article XVI, § 5), and forbidding employing government resources to promote religion in public schools (article IX, § 8).”
Plaintiffs’ attorney Dean Broyles went so far as to suggest that the actions of the school district was the “clearest case of the state trampling on the religious freedom rights of citizens that I have personally witnessed in my 18 years of practice as a Constitutional attorney. The program is extremely divisive and has unfortunately led to the harassment, discrimination, bullying, and segregation of children who, for good reasons, opt out of the program. EUSD’s Ashtanga yoga program represents a prime example of precisely why in America we wisely forbid the government from picking religious winners and losers, especially when you have a captive audience of very young and impressionable children as we do in our public schools.”
Broyles went to say that EUSD “had more than three months of warnings to make the right call and suspend the illegal program voluntarily, yet has negligently failed to act. The EUSD Trustees have persistently closed their eyes to the transparently religious nature of the program, determining to take the money and run with it. They have shown little concern or respect for families who were religiously burdened by the program and appropriately objected to religious beliefs and practices being illegally promoted in the public schools. And the EUSD Trustees and Superintendent have done nothing to solve the major problem that Children who opt out of Ashtanga yoga for religious and other reasons and who are not receiving the state mandated 200 minutes of PE every 10 days. Sadly after learning that the program violated the law, rather than doing the right thing and immediately suspending the program, EUSD’s Superintendent and Trustees engaged in months of delay and inaction. Meanwhile, Superintendent Baird repeated the misleading ‘mantra’ to the public and the press that EUSD had ‘stripped’ the program of religion or that it was not ‘religious.’”
The court disagreed. In a six-day, non-jury trial, it found that the district had done enough, holding that “any reasonable student would not associate yoga with religion the way that the District has set-up this program.”
David A. Peck, a lawyer with Coast Law Group LLP, a firm that represented parents who are supporters of the yoga program, explained that the judge had aptly applied the so-called ‘Lemon test,’ a legal litmus test first established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The test poses three different questions to determine whether a government’s action violates the First Amendment in matters of religion.
For more on the Lemon Test, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_v._Kurtzman
The NCLP, for its part, said it plans to appeal, announcing in a press release the same day as the decision that “this is not the end of the road for this case or the last word regarding the fate of yoga in public education—this is only the beginning.”
Sedlock v. Baird/Encinitas Union School District; San Diego Superior Court, 7/1/13
