Orange County school board takes up Chino Valley Unified prayer case

Last month, the Chino Valley Unified school board voted to let its long-running legal battle over prayer during public meetings lapse. Now, the Orange County Board of Education wants to take up the case.

Chino Valley Unified has opened school board meetings with prayer since at least 2010, according to court filings. But board members would also read from the Bible mid-meeting and a board member once discussed the Bible for 12 minutes mid-meeting.

In 2014, the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation sued the district, representing two parents and 20 anonymous district employees, residents and children.

Chino Valley repeatedly lost in the courts. A U.S. District Court judge sided with the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2016, finding that prayer at the school board’s meetings violated the First Amendment.

The district decided to not defend board members’ prayer during meetings. Instead, it adopted a policy that limited board members to discussing religion only when it was related to agenda items or in public comments and prohibited them from proselytizing while acting in their official capacity.

The district’s appeal of the 2016 ruling focused on its pre-meeting invocation prayer policy. But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals looked at the totality of prayer at Chino Valley Unified’s meetings, including the statements made by and behavior of board members prior to its change in policy, according to James A. Long, a senior attorney with Tyler & Bursch, the Murrieta- and Anaheim-based law firm that represented the school district in its appeals. A three-member panel of the 9th Circuit echoed the district court ruling in July 2018. And in December 2018, the 9th Circuit declined to reconsider the July decision.

That left Chino Valley Unified with one last hope – a hearing before the nation’s high court. But the school board, which includes two new members who expressed skepticism about the case, voted Jan. 17 to drop the matter.

Less than a month later, the Orange County Board of Education voted on Feb. 13 to intervene in the case, expressing concern over how the Chino Valley Unified case will affect its practice of pre-meeting invocations.

“The 9th Circuit’s decision impacts school boards throughout the entire nine-state jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit,” Long said in a news release Tuesday, Feb. 19. “The Orange County Board of Education has taken this preliminary step to allow it to intervene and appeal this far-reaching decision, not only for its own benefit, but for the benefit of school boards like it, who recognize that opening their meetings with prayer is part of a longstanding constitutional expression of good will, rooted in the historic foundations of this country.”

The 9th Circuit’s decision conflicts with a March 2018 decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld invocations before a Texas school board’s meetings in March 2018.

The Orange County school board’s intervention motions ask the 9th Circuit to recognize it as an interested party. And the board wants the court to make a decision by March 10, so that it could appeal the Chino Valley Unified case to the U.S. Supreme Court for consideration on this year’s docket.

“We find this completely frivolous and will be asking for them to be sanctioned,” Freedom From Religion Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said Tuesday. “This is very unnecessary and nobody can think of any parallel situation where an intervention like this has been attempted. It doesn’t even make any sense.”

Even if the 9th Circuit recognizes the Orange County board as an interested party, it doesn’t mean the Supreme Court will take up the case: The court has up to 8,000 cases presented to it each year, according to its website, but considers fewer than 200 in most years.