The CEO of a Christian organization that teaches the Bible to kids during the public school day is celebrating a recent legal victory against a district he believes was unfairly restricting his group’s efforts.
As CBN News recently reported, a federal judge has stepped in to temporarily halt seemingly blatant anti-Christian discrimination waged against Lifewise Academy at the hands of Everett Public Schools, a public district in Washington state.
Joe Penton, who heads Lifewise, told CBN about his organization’s aim and why he believes the district began purportedly targeting its activities.
“We provide Bible education for public school students during school hours,” Penton said. “We take kids under release time — religious instruction laws and the Supreme Court ruling — we take kids off school property during the school day, teach them a Bible lesson, and bring them back to school.”
Lifewise has quickly spread throughout the US, with one program emerging a few years ago in Everett, Washington — a chapter Penton said has been “going incredibly well.”
“[There are] dozens of families involved, making a big impact on those kids and the community,” he said. “However, there were some who, I guess you could say, want to stir up trouble, and we have those who oppose our efforts because, as you can imagine, we teach the Bible.”
Penton said a school board member upped the ante on criticism, which led to restrictions that forced Lifewise to sue the district.
“We started seeing policies come down that were specifically targeting us and discriminating against our program,” Penton said, offering up some examples. “The community fairs where every organization that serves students would come together to kind of sign kids up and promote what they do to students, all of a sudden, we were not allowed to be there anymore.”
Other issues concerned a permission-slip policy that purportedly required parents to sign their children up weekly, a departure from other programs that required only one permission slip per semester. This was one of the most pervasive issues that perpetuated the legal drama unfolding between the district and Lifewise.
“[That policy is] going to effectively shut down your interests if you have to go into the school office every single week to sign your kid out for this class that lasts all semester,” Penton said.
The Lifewise leader explained there were still other policies even more “comical.”
“They passed a policy that, if children brought anything back from Lifewise, whether it be a worksheet or whether it be a Bible, because that’s what we study at LifeWise, [it] had to come back in sealed envelopes so that other kids couldn’t see them,” he said. “And so if a child wanted to read their Lifewise Bible during study hall or during a free reading time, they wouldn’t be allowed to do so. They could read ‘Harry Potter,’ but they wouldn’t be able to read the Bible.”
Ultimately, Lifewise felt these policies were “transparently discriminatory” and “transparently unconstitutional,” so a family involved in the program took legal action against Everett Public Schools. The lawsuit came after Penton said he attempted to reason with officials — but to no avail.
Penton initially worried the legal proceedings that followed would be long and drawn out, but a judge recently issued a preliminary injunction reversing the aforementioned policies while the dispute progresses.
“With this preliminary injunction, there’s still the court date, there’s still the ultimate judgment to come,” Penton said. “But what it does mean is that there’s enough evidence and whatnot that the court said [to] the school, ‘You need to go ahead, at least until then, you need to reverse a lot of these policies.’”
Penton believes Lifewise will be victorious, despite wishing Lifewise didn’t need to take such action.
“We do not go looking for these fights,” he said. “We do not go looking for controversy, but we are finding that every time that happens, more people hear about LifeWise, and so we’re grateful and we get opportunities like this to share.”
CBN News previously reached out to the Everett Public Schools board for comment, but did not receive a response. Everett Public Schools spokesperson Harmony Weinberg reportedly told the Herald late last year that no additional comment could be given on the litigation.
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