Nine years after a previous Chino Valley Unified School District board majority sustained a definitive and what was for the district an expensive legal setback by testing the prevailing state/church separation standard that prohibits school prayer, the current school board majority is attempting again to imbue its proceedings with the aura of divine guidance.
The district filed a motion in the same forum, U.S. District Court, in which its practice of opening school board meetings with a prayer or invocation was rejected in 2016. The board, which has three members at present who were not in office in 2016, is pinning its hope for a different outcome on a substantial changeover on the U.S. Supreme Court and a slightly different tenor that panel has set with regard to public displays of religiosity in the interim.
One factor with regard to this matter in the Chino Valley that has not changed is the inspiration for the trend – the Reverend Jack Hibbs of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Congregation. Hibbs is a denominationalist, who holds that Christians have a duty to stand up for their beliefs by either running for election to public office themselves or supporting other Christians who do run, and then, upon taking office, Christianize public policy.
Beginning with the successful candidacy of Sylvia Orozco, a Calvary Chapel parishioner, to the school board in 2006, Hibb’s followed that up with the election of another Calvary Chapel attendee, James Na in 2008.
In 2012, a third member of Hibbs’ congregation, Andrew Cruz, was elected to the school board. Cruz, Na and Orozco, representing a religious trifecta that constituted a majority on the board, set about making significant inroads on the district’s policies.
A major milestone in this regard was making Bible study part of the district curriculum, as well as including benedictions at the beginning of the school board meetings and later, after Na became board president, outright evangelism from the district board dais, with Na telling those present at meetings that they should seek out Jesus Christ as their personal savior.
When the district began to move toward including daily prayer as part of basic instruction at the district’s schools, the Freedom From Religion Foundation of Madison, Wisconsin in 2014 stepped in and filed suit in Federal Court in Riverside against the district on behalf of two named plaintiffs, Larry Maldonado and Mike Anderson, and 21 unnamed plaintiffs who asserted they were alienated or intimidated at school board meetings because of the insistence of some district officials to engage in so-called Christian witnessing, including “prayers, Bible readings and proselytizing.”
A ruling on the Freedom From Religion Foundation lawsuit by Federal Judge Jesus Bernal resulted in overt religiosity and proselytizing within the district’s schools being eliminated in 2016. As a consequence of that ruling, the district had to reimburse the Freedom From Religion $546.70 for its cost in filing the lawsuit and cover its $202,425.00 in attorney’s fees.
Nevertheless, the Na, Cruz and Orozco voted for the district to appeal Bernal’s ruling to U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit ultimately upheld Bernal, which resulted in the district being responsible for another $75,680 of the Freedom From Religion’s legal fees with regard to the appeal.
In 2018, Orozco did not seek reelection and Christina Gagnier and Joe Schaffer were elected and thereafter joined with Board Member Irene Hernandez-Blair to form a board majority that countered Na and Cruz.
For four years, the denominationalists in the Chino Unified School District were one vote short of exercising the control over the district they had formerly. In the 2020 election Cruz and Na had been returned to office and Hernandez-Blair did not seek reelection. She was replaced by Don Bridge, who was as committed as was Hernandez-Blair to preventing a religious takeover of Chino Valley’s public schools.
Gagnier, an attorney, had aspirations of moving on to higher office, such as the state legislature and/or Congress. A politician in the mold of Congresswoman Katie Hill or Palm Springs Mayor Christy Holstege, Gagnier had the backing not only of local Democrats but those at the state and national levels, and she was a particular darling of the progressive establishment. She was being groomed to move up to Sacramento in conformance with the strictures of California’s term limits, from which perch she was to eventually launch her run for Congress. This plan was contingent upon her maintaining her status as an officeholder. In 2022, the Democrats, as the dominant party in Sacramento, joined forces to assist her in hanging onto her incumbency. California Superintendent of Public Schools Tony Thurmond, formerly a Bay Area assemblyman, was prominent among the Democrats campaigning on her behalf.
Despite the Democrats pulling out all, or most, of the stops in the effort to keep Gagnier in office, she ran head-on into Hibbs’ denominationalist political machine, which was militating to recapture the high ground it had occupied until the combination of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Judge Bernal, Hernandez-Blair, Gagnier and Schaffer had successfully obstructed it. The 2022 election did not go the Democrats way in the 2022 Chino Valley Unified School District election. Two further members of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills congregation, Sonja Shaw and Republican Central Committee Member Jon Monroe, proved victorious, displacing Gagnier and Schaffer on the board.
That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court in considering the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which a football coach challenged his having been disciplined for praying with members of his team on the field after games, in a 6-to-3 ruling dispensed with the previous standard, one embodied in the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman relating to such issues. Under Lemon v. Kurzman, laws could not have a religious intent, could not advance a particular religion but could not inhibit any religion either and could not promote government involvement in a particular. The Supreme Court, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, indicated that in prohibiting the coach from praying with his players, the coach’s free speech rights might have been violated and that before prohibiting prayer straight out, a governmental entity should consider “historical practices and understandings” with regard to prayer in the particular community involved.
With Na and Cruz yet on the school board and their being joined by Shaw and Monroe, the school board last month week at last got around to rolling the dice to determine if the ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton unwinding the controlling precedent in Lemon v. Kurzman will result in a different outcome than in 2016 and 2018.
At its July 17 meeting, the board, with Shaw and Monroe absent, discussed with the district’s legal counsel the retaining of Advocates for Faith & Freedom, a Murrieta-based nonprofit law firm specializing in issues relating to religious liberty to represent it with regard to what was generically described as “anticipated litigation.” No announcement of any action with regard to that matter was made that evening, but it was revealed that on Thursday, July 31, Advocates for Faith & Freedom, on behalf of the district, filed with the District Court in Riverside for relief from Judge Bernal’s 2016 injunction enjoining the board from permitting or endorsing prayers during meetings.
The district’s filing incorporates wording from the Supreme Court’s decision in the Kennedy v. Bremerton case, propounding that a majority of the board are intent on adopting a policy of kicking off the board meetings with an invocation or a prayer in keeping with the district’s “history and traditions.”
In a statement that minimized the degree to which the board as it was previously composed including Na and Cruz had virtually exclusively utilized Christian prayer as the board homilies, Shaw insisted that the district had “welcomed voices of all faiths without coercion or preference.” She said that secular “groups driven by political agendas” had straitjacketed the district into having “to abandon a unifying tradition,” namely prayer recitation. “We will not quietly surrender our right to reflect the values of our community and the freedoms our nation was built upon,” according to Shaw.
Robert Tyler, an attorney for Advocates for Faith & Freedom who was involved in 2016 and 2018 when the district policy was successfully challenged by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and lost on its appeal of Judge Bernal’s ruling, indicated the district this time will be hanging its hat on the reorientation the Supreme Court has made with regard to the subject of public religious expression in recent years.
Almost as soon as the filing was made, the Freedom From Religion Foundation indicated it will step up to oppose the district’s latest legal effort.