What was your first reaction when you read the complaint and the other court papers filed in this case? Have you ever before seen allegations of this sort in an Establishment Clause case? What past cases does this case remind you of?

I was stunned. I have worked with hundreds of public schools on “religion in schools” issues over the past 25 years. I can honestly say that the allegations in the case are among the most serious I have ever seen.

In most of the school districts where administrators and teachers continue to promote religion, the violations of the Establishment Clause are limited—and often unwitting. For example, some public schools have continued the longstanding tradition of holiday programs in December that come close to turning the school auditorium into the local church. Other public schools have continued to allow outside groups to distribute Bibles to students in the classroom. Occasionally a school official with little or no understanding of the law will do something unconstitutional and get called out, like the principal in Baltimore who held a prayer service in her school in 2011 to invoke divine aid in raising student test scores.

But these vestiges of an earlier era are rarely part of a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by school officials as is alleged in Sabine Parish. Although limited violations of the First Amendment cause conflicts and trigger lawsuits, such violations usually occur in schools that otherwise generally follow the law. These fights—and I have negotiated solutions to quite a few—are often a result of confusion about the law, a difference of opinion about how current law should be applied, or lack of clear school policies on religion.

But there are a small number of public schools—especially in the rural South—that continue to defy more than 50 years of Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school officials from promoting or inculcating religion. The pattern of illegal behavior alleged in Sabine Parish resembles allegations in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the Sumner County school district in Tennessee in 2011. The pattern of unconstitutional behavior in Sumner County schools included prayers over the loud speaker (led by students, but still unconstitutional), distribution of Bible to elementary students and examples of teacher endorsement of religion.

Sumner County settled the suit, agreeing to eliminate unconstitutional practices. The allegations in Sabine Parish, however, are far worse because they outline a far more pervasive effort by school officials to promote religion throughout the school culture. If these allegations are true, many administrators (including the top administrator for the district) and many teachers have been complicit in doing nothing less than converting a public school into a Christian school in flagrant violation of the law.