Constitutional Law — establishment clause — high school graduation

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Constitutional Law — establishment clause — high school graduation

It violated the Establishment Clause for a public school to hold its high school graduation ceremony in a church.

“We conclude that conducting a public school graduation ceremony in a church—one that among other things featured staffed information booths laden with religious literature and banners with appeals for children to join ‘school ministries’—runs afoul of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause as applied to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. That conclusion is consistent with well-established doctrine prohibiting school administrators from bringing church to the schoolhouse. E.g., People of State of Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Bd. of Educ. of Sch. Dist. No. 71, Champaign Cnty., 333 U.S. 203, 211-12 (1948) (religious instruction in public schools held unconstitutional). The same result should obtain when administrators bring seminal schoolhouse events to a church—at least to one with the proselytizing elements present in this case. The constitutional flaw with such activity is that it necessarily conveys a message of endorsement. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s ‘coercion cases,’ Lee and Santa Fe, cannot be meaningfully distinguished—both because endorsement, especially as it relates to children, has the potential to be coercive, and because there was actual coerced activity in this case.”

Reversed and Remanded.

10-2922 Doe v. Elmbrook School District

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Clevert, J., Flaum, J.