Lawyer: West Covina student told ‘Jesus not allowed in school’

WEST COVINA - A religious freedom organization is threatening legal action against the West Covina Unified School District after a first-grade student was allegedly prohibited from distributing a story about Jesus to his fellow students before Christmas.

According to Advocates for Faith and Freedom, Merced Elementary student Isaiah Martinez attempted to give his classmates candy canes with a message attached containing the so-called legend of the candy cane, which says the candy was created to represent the birth, ministry and death of Jesus Christ. When Isaiah’s teacher noticed the religious message, she prevented him from giving out his gift, telling him, “Jesus is not allowed in school,” according to Advocates for Faith and Freedom.

The public interest law firm alleges Isaiah’s constitutional rights were violated and is demanding the school district change its policy and issue a written apology to him.

“The actions of the school district were hostile and intimidating to Isaiah. Notwithstanding the fact that he is only in first grade, he is entitled to First Amendment protection,” lawyer Robert Tyler wrote in his demand letter to the district.

School and district officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tyler threatened legal action if the district does not respond by Jan. 13.

If it comes to that, the parties could be in for a long battle. A similar case in Texas – known as the candy cane case – in which a student was prohibited from handing out candy cane pens with a similar religious message, has been making its way through the courts for a decade.

And UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh said if the district chooses to fight, it would likely lose.

“If things are the way you describe them, the school district better be ready to write a big check for legal fees, not just their own, but also the plaintiff’s,” said Volokh, who teaches free speech law, religious freedom law and church-state relations law.

Volokh said he has seen a lot of similar cases involving schools and religious speech, and most come out in favor of the religious speaker.

“For some reason, schools seem to be laboring under the misconception that they have to, or that they are allowed to, suppress religious speech,” Volokh said. “Schools can’t engage in their own religious speech, but they also can’t suppress the religious speech of others… just as you can’t prevent a pro- environmental message from being distributed on a candy cane.”

Loyola Law School professor Aaron Caplan offers a more tempered assessment.

“I think it’s actually a tricky question,” he said. “We have two values that are both important. One value is that government should not be playing favorites when it comes to religion… the second value is that students have a right to say what they want.”

“In any particular case, I think the outcome depends on what the school’s ground rules were for the event,” he added.

If the school allowed students to bring whatever they wanted to give to one another, then it would be improper for the school to place limitations on just one type of gift, he explained. But if the school restricted gifts or messaging, then it has to be religiously neutral.

“Does the school really want to have a policy where, say, students can distribute white supremacist messages around a candy cane? Schools will say this is not a complete free speech zone, there are boundaries. Part of the legal question is, what are those boundaries?”

Isaiah first attempted to give out the religious stories on Dec. 13. His teacher Valerie Lu wouldn’t let him after she was told by principal Gordon Pfitzer that religious materials are not allowed to be distributed on school grounds, according to the complaint. Lu then removed the messages from the candy cane and told Isaiah he could distribute them, according to the complaint letter. The next week, Isaiah’s 21-year-old sister Alexandra attempted to convince Pfitzer that Isaiah’s constitutional right were being violated, but the principal still refused to allow him to hand out the candy canes and story at the class Christmas party, according to the compliant.

Tyler said schools are becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity and Advocates for Faith and Freedom has seen a surge in similar complaints.

“The pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that public schools are becoming a place of hostility toward Christian and other religiously-based worldviews. It’s time to push the pendulum back in the right direction where kids can experience true tolerance without religiously motivated hostility from their teachers and school officials,” he said in a statement.

Advocates for Faith and Freedom is demanding the school adopt a policy expressly prohibiting school teachers and officials from action that “can reasonably be viewed by a religiously affiliated student as disapproval of the student’s religion or hostile toward the student’s religion.” The organization is also demanding that school teachers and officials receive annual training on the First Amendment.

“These actions will help to provide students with an environment of neutrality and true tolerance,” according to the demand letter.

The legend distributed by Isaiah said that a candymaker in Indiana made the candy cane white “to symbolize the Virgin Birth and the sinless nature of Jesus,” hard “to symbolize the Solid Rock, the foundation of the Church, and firmness of the promises of God,” in the shape of a J for Jesus, and with a red stripe “for the blood shed by Christ on the cross so that we could have the promise of eternal life.”

The legend has been debunked by various news organizations, including Smithsonian.com, which points out that historical references to the candy cane date back to the 17th Century, at least a hundred years before Indiana was even a state.—-

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