All five of the Chino Valley Unified School Board members are foursquare behind the strategy of staying the course with the district’s revival of the school prayer initiative that failed when it was pursued a decade ago.
That game plan anticipates a repeat of the losses the district sustained with regard to the issue in 2016 and 2018. Board members and their advisors are taking in stride the repetition of the 2016 defeat that took place on October 13 in Federal Court in Riverside. They are prepared to have their noses bloodied when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco takes up the appeal they are making of the October 13 ruling. The final and true victory will come, they believe, in Washington, D.C. late next year or in 2027, when the U.S. Supreme Court considers the matter.
In 2012, Andrew Cruz, a member of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Congregation, was elected to the school board. Cruz joined James Na and Sylvia Orozco, who were also Calvary Chapel parishioners, on the panel. Orozco, Na and Cruz adhered to Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Pastor Jack Hibbs’ denominationalist philosophy, which 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.
Under the leadership of Orozco, Na and Cruz, the district made Bible study part of the district curriculum and included benedictions at the beginning of the school board meetings. Na, upon becoming board president, engaged in evangelism from the district board dais, 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 the United States District Court for the Central District of California 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.”
Federal Judge Jesus Bernal in 2016 ordered that the district cease engaging in overt religiosity and proselytizing, and awarded the Freedom From Religion Foundation $202,971.70 425.00 in attorney’s fees and court costs.
Nevertheless, the Na, Cruz and Orozco voted to appeal Judge 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..
In the years since, Orozco left the school board but two other Hibbs acolytes, Sonja Shaw and Jon Monroe were elected to the board in 2022. With the school board under the grip of Na, Cruz, Monroe and Shaw, who was established shortly after her election as the school board president, the district contemplated taking up once more an effort to acculturate public education in Chino Valley in accordance with Christian principles
This year, believing the time was propitious to do so, the board moved to have the district retain Advocates for Faith & Freedom, a Murrieta-based nonprofit law firm specializing in issues relating to religious liberty and led by attorney Robert Tyler, who considers himself to be God’s lawyer. On July 31, 2025, Tyler filed on behalf of the district an appeal with the Federal District Court in Riverside for relief from Judge Bernal’s 2016 injunction enjoining the board from permitting or endorsing prayers during meetings.
In making that filing, Tyler hung the district’s hat on the 2022 case of Kennedy v. Bremerton, in which a football coach challenged his having been disciplined for praying with members of his team on the field after games. The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court, laden with six justices appointed by what are deemed to be “conservative,” i.e., Republican presidents and three by “liberal,” i.e., Democrat presidents, 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.
As fate would have it, the district’s appeal was routed to the courtroom of Judge Bernal. Despite the district’s filing incorporating wording from the Supreme Court’s decision in the Kennedy v. Bremerton case, on October 13, Judge Bernal, utilizing the same citations and references as he had in 2016, denied the district’s appeal and its accompanying petition to allow the board to be able to engage in religious invocations at its meetings. He ruled again that the school district cannot open board meetings with prayer.
“Defendants argue that the court should grant relief from the order… because the legal basis underpinning this court’s order and the 9th Circuit’s opinion was overruled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District,” Judge Bernal wrote. “The court finds that defendants have not articulated a sufficient basis for relief. Defendants shouldn’t be allowed to get another bite at the apple years after losing just because they don’t like that the court ruled against them,”
The Sentinel has learned that the school board, which now consists of Na, Cruz, Shaw and John Cervantes, as well as Shaun Smith, who was appointed by the board after Monroe resigned in order to take a lucrative employment position in Utah, fully anticipated to lose the appeal filed on July 31 with the United States District Court for the Central District of California, irrespective of whether it was heard by Judge Bernal or any of the other judges in Riverside. Moreover, they further anticipate that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will uphold Judge Bernal this time, just as it did in 2018. Tyler believes, and he has convinced the school board members, that he will be successful in getting the Supreme Court to reconsider the matter after the Ninth Circuit makes its ruling, and that the district will prevail at that level.
God is with the district, Tyler has told the board, and in His Providence, He will ensure that the district overcomes the daunting odds it faces. U.S. Courts of Appeals routinely handle more than 50,000 cases each year. Generally, 7,000 to 8,000 of those decisions are appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On a yearly basis, the Supreme Court considers only about 100 of those cases.
-Mark Gutglueck