“Too Christian” 10 yr old Christian home schooled girl forced to attend government-run school

January 11, 2011 10:51


The lower court effectively determined that it’s a ‘lost opportunity’ if a child’s strongly held Christian views are not sifted and challenged in a public school setting.  We appealed because that’s a dangerous precedent

From Alliance Defense Fund

Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney John Anthony Simmons and ADF Senior Counsel Tom Marcelle will be available for media interviews following oral argument Thursday before the New Hampshire Supreme Court in the case of a home-schooled girl ordered into a government school by a state judge. Simmons, an attorney from Hampton and one of nearly 1,900 attorneys in the ADF alliance, will argue before the high court on behalf of the girl’s mother, who is objecting to the judge’s order on appeal.

“Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children,” Simmons said. “Courts can settle disputes, but they cannot legitimately order a child into a government-run school on the basis that her religious views need to be mixed with other views. That’s precisely what the lower court admitted it is doing in this case, and that’s where our concern lies.”

“The daughter was, by all academic and social measures, doing very well while being home-schooled, as the lower court itself admitted,” Marcelle added. “But it used the Christian faith of this mother and daughter as a weapon against them to force the girl into a government school. There was no legitimate reason to do that.”

The court acknowledged that, while being home-schooled, the girl was “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising, and intellectually at or superior to grade level,” but then it ordered her out of the home schooling she loved so that her religious views will be challenged at a government school. That’s where Simmons says the court went too far.

Simmons filed a motion to reconsider and stay the order in August 2009. In her denial of the motions, Judge Lucinda V. Sadler of the Family Division of the Judicial Court for Belknap County in Laconia wrote that the girl “is at an age when it can be expected that she would benefit from the social interaction and problem solving she will find in public school, and granting a stay would result in a lost opportunity for her.”

“The lower court effectively determined that it’s a ‘lost opportunity’ if a child’s strongly held Christian views are not sifted and challenged in a public school setting.  We appealed because that’s a dangerous precedent,” explained Simmons, who filed his brief and reply brief with the New Hampshire Supreme Court after it agreed to hear the case.

In the original order issued in July 2009, the court reasoned that the girl’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view” and then ordered her to be enrolled in a government school instead of being home-schooled.

ADF is a legal alliance of Christian attorneys and like-minded organizations defending the right of people to freely live out their faith. Launched in 1994, ADF employs a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.



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