A Fort Wayne third-grader's parents have sued the school district, claiming she was sent to a religious instruction program on school grounds without their permission.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which filed the lawsuit for the parents this week in federal court in Fort Wayne, is asking a judge to declare the program unconstitutional and ban it from operating on school property. It also asks the judge to prevent the school from sending the girl to the religious program without her parents' explicit consent.
The Haley Elementary School student and her parents are named in the suit only by their initials.
Fort Wayne
Community Schools spokeswoman Krista Stockman declined comment on the suit. The head of the church group that offers the program was traveling Friday and couldn't be reached.
The suit contends that the child was taken to the class in a trailer on school property for several weeks this past year while she was in third grade. Her parents had not given permission for her to attend the class and she was removed after they found out, the suit says.
The ACLU argues the school violated the First Amendment clause against establishment of religion and the parents' 14th Amendment right to provide for their own child's religious education.
Associated Churches of Fort Wayne and Allen County has since 1944 offered the weekly classes in which students learn the Bible during school day sessions in mobile classrooms that are nicknamed "little churches on wheels," or in some cases at a nearby church building. The group's website says 80 percent of local schoolchildren in grades 3, 4 and 5 take part.
The group says the classes are non-denominational and use the Good News Bible as a textbook. The class, the website says, "is based on understanding the word of God and applying it to our lives, living as an example of God's love, and trying to be more like Jesus every day."
ACLU legal director Ken Falk said courts have long held that students have the right to exercise their religion in release-time programs as long as they are held off school property, and the ACLU has defended students' rights in such cases.
But, "It's also clear that schools cannot accommodate that by putting the church, as it were, on school property," Falk said. "At that point the school is establishing religion."
Falk said a similar 2008 lawsuit against Huntington schools was settled after a judge granted the ACLU a preliminary injunction.