WASHINGTON -- A small timber town at the foot of the Clearwater Mountains in central Idaho appears to be on its way to making history as the scene of the next constitutional battle in the Supreme Court over school prayer.
In a closed-door meeting Monday in Grangeville, the school district's board of trustees voted to go to the Supreme Court as soon as their lawyers can prepare the appeal.
The case will test the justices' view on the constitutionality of prayers at public schools when the praying is planned and led by students themselves -- the latest approach being promoted by conservative Christian and other pro-prayer groups.
The issue has been building in intensity since the Supreme Court's latest ruling against school prayer: a 5-4 decision in 1992 that outlawed prayers during public school graduation exercises.
A new appeal to the Supreme Court appears to have a strong chance of attracting the justices' attention, because lower courts have reached conflicting rulings on the specific issue: One ruled in favor of student-led prayer, the other against it. Such a split in the courts often leads the Supreme Court to step in and settle a major issue.
The decision against student-led prayers came in the Grangeville case in November, in a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. It disagreed with the pro-prayer decision in 1992 by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
The Grangeville school trustees had the option of asking the San Francisco court to reconsider, but decided to skip that step and voted Monday to make the Supreme Court their next stop.
In the justices' most recent prayer decision, school officials had been involved directly in making arrangements for the praying.
Focusing on that aspect of the ruling, prayer advocates devised a strategy to make prayers a matter of student choice in a number of communities in the hope of getting around the 1992 decision and insulating the students' ritual from constitutional attack.
For more than 18 months, a conservative legal group, the American Center for Law and Justice, set up by the Rev. Marion G. "Pat" Robertson as part of his Virginia Beach, Va., complex, has been seeking to persuade public schools to adopt the student-led alternative. In a massive letter-writing campaign, the Robertson center argued that that would be constitutional -- a view vigorously opposed in a counter-campaign of letters by the liberal American Civil Liberties Union.
A number of school districts -- including the one in Grangeville -- already had been allowing students to plan graduation prayers. But the center's lawyers wanted to restore praying more widely to encourage a new round of lawsuits that might set up a new test for the Supreme Court.
The center's campaign got a major boost from the Supreme Court in June, when the justices chose to bypass the first case to reach them on student-led prayers. The federal appeals court that decided the case, originating in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake City, said there was no constitutional problem if school officials allowed students to decide whether they want to pray, and then compose what would be said, if anything.
The Supreme Court's refusal to hear that case was not a specific endorsement of student-led prayers. But it did indicate that the justices wanted to let the issue continue to percolate in lower courts.
Among several new cases moving through the courts, the Grangeville case was the furthest along and was "factually set up the best," according to the Center's chief attorney, Jay Alan Sekulow, of Atlanta.
The center's lawyers and school board attorneys won that case in a U.S. District Court last year, but the ACLU and a mother of three Grangeville students took the case on to the appeals court in San Francisco, and won at that level.
The Circuit Court said that it made no difference, constitutionally, for students to make the plans for praying: When they do, they are exercising the public school officials' authority by proxy.
The Supreme Court's timetable for handling an appeal depends upon how soon it is filed.