A Winning Precedent and a New Fight: The ACLJ Takes on Another School District Targeting a Teacher’s Faith

The ink is barely dry on our landmark victory in the Fifth Circuit – and the ACLJ is already putting it to work in a new case.

Just weeks ago, in Barber v. Rounds, we won a unanimous ruling protecting a Texas teacher’s right to pray on school grounds before her workday began. The Fifth Circuit held unequivocally that school officials cannot impose categorical restrictions on a teacher’s private religious expression simply because students might see it. The court confirmed that such expression is “doubly protected” under both the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. It was a landmark win – and it’s exactly the precedent we’re now citing in Arroyo-Castro v. Gasper, our new amicus brief before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The facts in Arroyo-Castro follow a familiar and troubling pattern. A Connecticut seventh-grade social studies teacher, Marisol Arroyo-Castro, kept a small personal crucifix in her classroom. Her school, like most, was filled with teachers’ personal items – sports pennants, family photos, pop culture figurines, a Virgin Mary photograph, even a Scripture-quoting coffee mug. None of those teachers faced consequences. But the school singled out Ms. Arroyo-Castro’s crucifix, and a federal district court agreed with the school, ruling that because teachers are responsible for the “classroom environment,” the crucifix fell within her official job duties and was therefore government speech that the school could control.

That is precisely the reasoning Barber– and the Supreme Court’s Kennedy v. Bremertondecision before it – rejected. Kennedy made clear that courts must look practically at what an employee is actually paid to do, not stretch a generic policy into a mandate covering every personal object in a teacher’s workspace. In Barber, we successfully applied that principle to a teacher praying before school. Here, the same logic applies: A school cannot look at a room full of personal items and single out the religious ones for suppression. That is viewpoint discrimination – and after Kennedy, it has no legal foundation.

The Second Circuit should follow the Fifth Circuit’s lead. Religious liberty is not a privilege granted by employers or government institutions – it is a foundational constitutional right, enshrined in the First Amendment precisely because the Founders understood that faith is central to human dignity and a free society. When government officials are permitted to strip that right from teachers the moment they enter a school building, they don’t just harm one person – they send a chilling message to people of faith everywhere that their beliefs must be checked at the door of public life.

The Second Circuit now has an opportunity to correct this error and reaffirm what the law already makes clear: Government cannot single out religious expression for suppression while allowing every other viewpoint to remain. We have taken this fight to the court because the stakes are bigger than one classroom or one teacher – they go to the heart of whether Americans are truly free to live out their faith in public. We will continue to press forward, using every legal tool available, to ensure that this fundamental freedom is protected – not just in this case, but for every American.

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