Religious Discrimination Lawsuit

Plano Parents Counter with Plan to End Religious Discrimination Lawsuit

By Jim Brown and Jody Brown
April 26, 2005

(AgapePress) - Christian families in Plano, Texas, are rejecting the terms of an offer by the local school district to settle a religious discrimination case. A Christian attorney says officials with the Plano Independent School District (ISD) don't understand that the civil rights of parents are not for sale.

The Plano ISD has offered to pay the attorneys' fees and monetary damages of several families in the district who have had their religious freedom rights violated. However, as part of the settlement offer, the district would not admit liability in several cases involving censorship of students' and parents' free speech. The district has offered each family $100 in return for admitting no wrongdoing.

Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for Liberty Legal Institute, says his clients are rejecting the district's offer -- and are responding with a counter-offer.

"Instead of the damages they were willing to pay to our clients, we offered to take only one dollar for the clients and to cut [in half] the amount of attorneys' fees that we would be able to recover," Sasser explains. "So we offered to take a whole lot less money. In return they just have to admit what they did was wrong, agree to a court order that they'll never do that again, and train their employees appropriately."

According to LLI, the families have said they cannot accept the district's settlement offer because it does not offer "future protection against the same type of violations, and, in fact, denies all wrongdoing and that any violations have occurred."

The case stems from what the Liberty Legal Institute has described as a "large amount of evidence that demonstrates the pervasive religious hostility" in the school district for well over a year. Among examples cited by LLI are: a third-grader was prohibited from handing out "goody bags" that included candy canes with a religious message; a young girl was prevented by school officials from distributing pencils with "Jesus" written on them; another student was told she could not invite friends to an Easter event at her church; and a letter was sent home requesting that parents not send their children to school with anything red or green during the holiday season. (See earlier story)

Sasser says the monetary offer to families demonstrates to him that the school district wants to obscure its religious intolerance.

"What they're trying to do is put up a smokescreen and to pretend like they are favorable to things that are religious in nature," the attorney says. He believes the district desires to "hide the fact that, in reality, their policies are simple: they are designed to squelch the speech of students, including religious speech. They've had a pattern and practice, over many years, of discriminating specifically against religious speech."

The LLI attorney makes it clear: "Our clients' civil rights are not for sale. The whole thing will be over if they will just agree they violated the children's rights and that it won't happen again."

But the attorney is not optimistic. The Plano Independent School District is scheduled to voter on Liberty Legal's counter-offer on May 3. Sasser says it is doubtful the district will approve the offer. In that case, he says, LLI will proceed with the case, "knowing that they obviously do not value religious freedom."

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