Written by Don Byrd
Updating a blog post from earlier this year, a Louisiana school district has entered into a consent decree with the ACLU to settle a lawsuit challenging egregious violations of religious liberty, including the harassment of a 6th-grade Buddhist student.
USAToday reports on the agreement:
The agreement filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Shreveport contains a long list of prohibited practices. For instance, it says school officials won’t discourage or encourage religious activities; they won’t assign readings from religious texts, absent a non-religious educational purpose; and they won’t express their personal religious beliefs in class or at school events.
You can read the 11-page agreement here. Sometimes these suits seem to drag out for several months before an agreement is reached. It’s nice to see the school district respond relatively quickly. Even nicer would have been to protect the liberties of students and families to begin with.
At the ACLU’s Blog of Rights, Heather Weaver describes the heart-breaking harassment of the plaintiffs that has only intensified in the wake of the lawsuit.
