Poway Unified sued over removal of teacher's 'God' signs

[Soldier4Christ]

Poway Unified sued over removal of teacher's 'God' signs

A Michigan public interest law firm filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Poway Unified School District on Monday, arguing that school officials violated a math teacher's constitutional rights when they order him to remove two banners with the words "God" and "Creator" on them from his classroom walls.

The lawsuit alleges that the school district violated Westview High School teacher Bradley Johnson's freedom of speech when officials ordered him to take down the banners in January after more than 25 years of displaying them because they conveyed a religious message.

The banners, measuring approximately 7 feet long by 2 feet wide, carried the phrases: "In God We Trust," "One Nation Under God," "God Bless America," "God Shed His Grace on Thee" and "All Men Are Created Equal, They are Endowed By Their Creator," the lawsuit said.

All of which are phrases from either historical texts, like the Declaration of Independence, patriotic songs or the Pledge of Allegiance, said Robert Muise, an attorney with the Thomas More Law Center who is handling the case.

"Here you have educational banners that convey messages from our religious history," Muise said Tuesday by phone, adding that the banners were "educational" in nature and serve a clear purpose in public schools, helping teachers, like Johnson, to educate students to be better informed citizens.

In asking for the banners to be removed, Westview Principal Dawn Kastner, a defendant named in the lawsuit, told Johnson that the banners were impermissible at school because they promoted a "Judeo-Christian" viewpoint, the lawsuit said.

Of particular concern to school officials, were the words "God" and "Creator," according to the lawsuit.

The district would not respond to question regarding the lawsuit Tuesday, however, because they have not been formally served with the complaint, Poway Unified spokeswoman Sharon Raffer said.

Muise said that he planned to deliver the complaint to school and district officials by the end of the month. Once they have formally been served with the complaint, they have 20 days to respond, he said.

The complaint cites the Poway Unified School District, its five school board members -- Jeff Magnum, Linda Vanderveen, Andrew Patapow, Todd Gutschow and Penny Ranftle -- as well as Superintendent Don Phillips, Assistant Superintendent William Chiment and Westview Principal Kastner as defendants. Some of the defendants, Muise said, had visited the classroom in prior years, without complaints.

According to the lawsuit, Johnson estimated that as many as seven different school principals, numerous school board members, superintendents, assistant superintendents, more than 4,000 students and several thousand parents had visited the classroom where the banners were displayed. Johnson had never received a complaint before this year, the lawsuit said.

While no parents with students in one of Johnson's math classes were immediately available to speak Tuesday, one Westview parent with two students in the school did say that she saw no problem with the signs as long as they were a representation of country's history and students were not being "preached" to.

"Basically, these are the same things that you would find in the dollar bill, Pledge of Allegiance and a lot of other governmental areas," said parent Marie Dell'Aquila in a phone interview.

She added that while neither of her students had taken Johnson's class to her knowledge, she did not find the signs offensive.

Peter Scheer, the executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition agreed, saying that the phrases were a representation of America's history, and as such, are an important aspect of a student's education.

"No one in their right minds would think that to read segments or excerpts from the great founding documents of this country which include invocations of the Almighty, that that could conceivably violate some students' religious rights," Scheer said.

In addition to alleging that the district violated Johnson's California and U.S. constitutional rights by restricting his speech, the lawsuit said that this restriction "serves no educational purpose, is not reasonably related to any legitimated pedagogical concern, and conveys a government-sponsored message of disapproval of and hostility toward religion."

Johnson is asking that the district be prohibited from enforcing such "viewpoint-based" restriction on certain educational messages and that he be awarded nominal damages for the past loss of his constitutional rights, as well as have the cost of litigation, attorney fees and other expenses covered.

"This treatment of things that are religious in nature of sort as a pathogen that needs to be removed from the public sector needs to be stopped," Muise said. "We are in this for the long haul. If this is a case that needs to go all the way up the U.S. Supreme Court, we are certainly willing to do that."