ACLJ Represents 9-Year-Old Students Banned From Giving Classmates Easter Eggs With Bible Verses in Them

Public school teachers unconstitutionally refused to allow students to share Easter eggs with their classmates because they contained Bible verses. The ACLJ is now defending two nine-year-old children in Georgia because they have the right to freely share their faith, especially during the holy time of Easter.

The First Amendment undisputedly protects students’ right to pray and engage in other religious speech or activities in a nondisruptive fashion. Public school students don’t “shed their constitutional rights . . . at the schoolhouse gate” and are protected in their right to live out their faith. As courts have recognized, and the ACLJ has vigorously defended for many years, that right includes sharing religious materials with their classmates.

Our clients prepared plastic Easter eggs containing jelly beans, a poem about the colors of the jelly beans, and Bible verses about the meaning of Easter. The plastic eggs were to be handed out by the students the day before Good Friday. Our clients’ parents told the teachers that their children had prepared gifts for their classmates. When the teachers checked inside the eggs and saw the Bible verses, they didn’t allow our clients to hand them out due to the religious content.

The school principal called the children’s parents, informing them that they were not allowed to hand out the eggs. The parents called the school district for confirmation, and the school district said school children couldn’t share written religious materials with fellow students.

It is a foundational principle of constitutional law that public school students have a fundamental right to share religious materials with fellow students. As one court emphasized, “It has been clear for over half a century that the First Amendment protects elementary school students from religious-viewpoint discrimination.” The law is clear that suppressing student-to-student distribution of religious literature, whether it be a Bible verse, a religious poem, or an inscribed candy cane, is unlawful under the First Amendment. And that includes elementary school students – they still possess a right to freely share their faith.

We’re prepared to go to court to defend these students and their right to share Bible verses with their classmates.

The ACLJ has a storied history of representing students who face infringements on their faith, such as a student in Nevada forced to perform obscene material, on whose behalf we recently won a significant victory in federal court. In the past, we have won many similar cases, such as a case we won almost 20 years ago on behalf of a student who wanted to hand out religious Christmas cards. We also recently won a case where a public school teacher forcibly removed a cross from a student’s neck. We secured an apology from the teacher and school administrators for violating the student’s religious liberty.

The law is well-established, and schools have no right to feign ignorance. Help us as we hold this school accountable for depriving these children of their fundamental rights.