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For Immediate Release: September 25, 2012 |
School Officials Ask Ohio Supreme Court to Strike First Amendment from Freshwater Lawsuit, Reject Science Teacher’s Right to Academic Freedom
MOUNT VERNON, Ohio—Attorneys for the Mount Vernon City School District
have asked the Ohio Supreme Court to strike portions of public school
teacher John Freshwater’s appeal briefing, including the text of the
First Amendment. This technical motion is the School Board’s latest
effort to counter an argument by Rutherford Institute attorneys that the
School District violated Freshwater’s academic freedom rights by firing
him for encouraging students to think critically about the school’s
science curriculum, particularly as it relates to evolution theories.
The Ohio Supreme Court has agreed to The Rutherford Institute’s request
to hear the case, which arose after the Mount Vernon City School
District’s Board of Education suspended Freshwater, a 24-year veteran in
the classroom, in 2008 and officially terminated him in January 2011.
The Rutherford Institute’s merits brief to the Ohio Supreme Court is available at www.rutherford.org.
“It’s a sad day when public school officials want to eliminate the
First Amendment from a discussion about classroom education and academic
freedom,” stated John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford
Institute. “It’s time that school officials stop paying lip service to
the need for young people to learn about the Constitution and start
putting those principles into practice.”
In June 2008, the Mount Vernon City School District Board of Education
voted to suspend John Freshwater, a Christian with a 20-year teaching
career at Mount Vernon Middle School, citing concerns about his conduct
and teaching materials, particularly as they related to the teaching of
evolution. Earlier that year, school officials reportedly ordered
Freshwater, who had served as the faculty appointed facilitator,
monitor, and supervisor of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes student
group for 16 of the 20 years that he taught at Mount Vernon, to remove
“all religious items” from his classroom, including a Ten Commandments
poster displayed on the door of his classroom, posters with Bible
verses, and his personal Bible which he kept on his desk. Freshwater
agreed to remove all items except for his Bible. Showing their support
for Freshwater, students even organized a rally in his honor. They also
wore t-shirts with crosses painted on them to school and carried Bibles
to class. School officials were seemingly unswayed by the outpouring of
support for Freshwater. In fact, despite the fact that the Board’s own
policy states that because religious traditions vary in their treatment
of science, teachers should give unbiased instruction so that students
may evaluate it “in accordance with their own religious tenets,” school
officials suspended and eventually fired Freshwater, allegedly for
criticizing evolution and using unapproved materials to facilitate
classroom discussion of origins of life theories. Freshwater appealed
the termination in state court, asserting that the school’s actions
violated his rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the
United States Constitution and constituted hostility toward religion. A
Common Pleas judge upheld the School Board’s decision, as did the Fifth
District Court of Appeals, without analyzing these constitutional
claims. In appealing to the Ohio Supreme Court, Institute attorneys
argued that the Board through its actions violated the First Amendment
academic freedom rights of both Freshwater and his students.
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