ICC Note: As previously reported, in 2016, a Washington State school district decided not to renew a high school football coach’s contract due to his practice of post-game prayer on the field. Although the coach, Joe Kennedy, never encouraged or required students to join him, the superintendent insisted that the practice was unconstitutional. Kennedy’s legal team has now filed a petition with the United States Supreme Court over the matter.

06/27/2018 United States (Christian News Network) – Attorneys for former high school football coach Joe Kennedy have filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes that it would accept an appeal surrounding Kennedy’s loss of employment as school district officials decided in 2016 not to renew his coaching contract in the midst of a battle over his desire to pray at the 50-yard line.

“By viewing all speech by teachers and coaches as school speech, the Ninth Circuit converts any religious expression by teachers and coaches into the government’s own religious expression,” the writ of certiorari, filed on Monday, reads, referring to the Ninth Circuit decision that declared that Kennedy’s prayer practice could be considered a government-endorsement of Christianity by onlookers.

“Indeed, by its terms, the Ninth Circuit’s rule admits of no distinction between a teacher leading students in prayer during curricular instruction and a teacher saying a quiet prayer over her own lunch in the school cafeteria. All of it is ‘demonstrative communication,’ and so all of it may be made a firing offense,” it laments.

Kennedy’s attorneys argue that the appeals court’s conclusions do not square with the First Amendment, because “[s]chools are no more entitled ‘to purge from the public sphere all that in any way partakes of the religious,’ than they are to force ‘teachers [to] shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’”

The petition points to rulings in other states where the personal religious expression of teachers was upheld, including in Pennsylvania, where a court declared in the 2003 case of Nichol v. ARIN Intermediate Unit 28 that “there is no danger that permitting an … employee to wear a cross while working at school will encroach upon the Establishment Clause.”

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