An organization that provides Bible programming to public school children is suing a Washington state school district, alleging officials are improperly targeting its Christian program.
Joel Penton, CEO of LifeWise Academy, told CBN News that his organization allows parents to opt in for their children to go off-site during lunch, recess, and other non-essential periods at public schools during the day.
This is what discrimination looks like.
The Everett School District is now requiring students attending these off-site classes to hide their Bibles before returning to the classroom.
Be informed, not misled.
Joel Penton, CEO of LifeWise Academy, told CBN News his organization allows parents to opt-in for their kids to go off-site during lunch, recess, and other non-essential periods from public schools during the day.
Children are then given Bible lessons before returning to their respective schools. LifeWise, which launched in 2019, operates in hundreds of schools and is independently funded. It’s a Released Time religious instruction program, made legal in 1952, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Zorach v. Clauson case that public school students can be released during school hours to attend religious classes.
“We’ve been growing rapidly in the last few years, but we started up a program in Everett, Washington, and it was going so well last year,” Penton said. “We had dozens of families engaged, and some individuals went to the school board … one gentleman on the school board, in particular, was swayed by these things, and they put in some really discriminatory rules.”
He continued, “They updated their policies and changed the rules on us so that, unlike other student groups … we cannot show up now at any of the school-related functions like the fair where kids sign up for programs like ours and learn about new things.”
Penton said LifeWise has been “singled out.” Beyond purportedly precluding the organization from participating in these official club events, he said LifeWise is now required to obtain weekly parental permission slips from families who wish to opt in.
Normally, Penton said, this would be a one-time permission granted at the start of the school year.
“They have now changed the rules that children need to bring in a permission slip every single week,” he explained. “And not only that, they’ve said that the parents need to carry in the permission slip each and every week … it’s clearly an obstacle they’re putting up to try to push us out because that’s unreasonable for parents to do that.”
Penton alleged no other clubs are being asked to do the same. This school year, he said, LifeWise will be in 1,000 schools and no other school across the U.S. requires such permission.
And then there's this:
The third issue Penton mentioned — one he called “almost comically discriminatory” — is a policy reportedly requiring students who leave LifeWise during the day and come back to school to place any materials, including Bibles, in a “sealed envelope.”
“That sounds like it can’t even be real, but a sealed envelope as though the material is dangerous — that it will infect other children,” Penton said.
He believes the school board changed its policies to “single … out” LifeWise.
“It seems to be a transparent attempt to get us to effectively shut down the program,” Penton said. “And so we really tried to handle this quietly. … We went to the school and tried to very quietly say, ‘You know, this is discrimination; you can’t do this. There’s a constitution in this country.’ And they were not receptive to that.”
Penton contacted First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal firm, to get assistance. A letter pushing back on the policies reportedly didn’t yield the response First Liberty wanted.
So, LifeWise has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the district’s policies. Penton said parents feel targeted by the district’s actions, and he’s working to ensure they are overturned.
“As you can imagine, parents are upset by this, and especially when … we’ve been trying to do this in a way that isn’t offensive,” he said. “Kids whose parents opt them into the program want to quietly have a Bible study.”
Ultimately, Penton said LifeWise wants families to have full access to the program in a “way that is not discriminatory toward them.” He’s hoping to see normal policies reinstated.
“We’re not looking for fights,” Penton said. “We’re looking to teach the Bible to kids.”
Therein lies the problem. They are teaching the Bible to kids. Secularists simply cannot handle the fact that kids might be taught anything that is not aligned with so called "progressive" ideology.
KIRO 7 in Seattle said this:
An off-campus religious group for students is officially suing the Everett School District.
According to The Everett Herald, LifeWise Academy alleged that the district kept the group from attending a “School Resource Fair.” The academy is an optional Bible education program that pulls students out of school during lunch and recess for classes.
As things currently stand, LifeWise Academy is barred from participating in community events, from displaying flyers on campus, and any student within the academy must conceal any written materials they receive from the program in a sealed envelope in their backpack.
Additionally, the school district requires parents to sign off on and approve the student’s participation via a permission slip policy.
LifeWise Academy has called the school-mandated permission slip policy “needlessly complicated.” The religious academy is asking the district to retract these “restrictions,” claiming it’s a violation of freedom of speech.
The Herald Net, a local news source, published a long article explaining to the public why they opposed the Bible class while explaining that they are neutral. "The program, LifeWise Academy, currently operates near Emerson Elementary in Everett. It opened in January [2025], the first to begin in the Puget Sound area.
The Net said, "Once a week, volunteers from the nonprofit take children out of public school in the middle of the school day — during lunch and recess periods — for optional off-site Bible classes. Everett Public Schools does not support, endorse, or oppose the program, but allows it to operate, citing a 1952 Supreme Court ruling and state guidance that allows off-campus religious instruction."
"Does not support, endorse, or oppose the program"?
They must be kidding. The school has gone to great lengths to eliminate the Bible class.
Some parents have previously spoken out against the program at board meetings over the past few months. But on Tuesday, dozens nearly filled the board room following a Nov. 19 letter, sent to the Everett Public Schools Board of Directors, that threatened legal action if the board didn’t relax a number of rules surrounding released-time religious instruction.
Takeaway
If you are uninformed and read the entire article, you get the sense that the Christians are feeling entitled and asking for special treatment.
This is a very different worldview from that of our Founding Fathers. They succeeded in building the greatest, most prosperous, most free, most generous nation in the history of the world.
No, Thomas Jefferson did not tell the Danbury Baptists their church could not freely practice their religion due to seperation of church and state. He told them that he and the other Founders had created a wall of protection between the church and the state so the state could not meddle in the affairs of the church.
Another of our Founding Fathers, Noah Webster, agreed with Jefferson on the importance of the Christian faith and the Bible.
Webster not only published the dictionary, but he was also the Father of "public education."
He did not see Christianity as an intrusion into education as educators do today.
He declared that the government was responsible for "disciplining our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties."
He said, "Education is useless without the Bible."
He also said, "The Bible was America's basic textbook in all fields."
Rather than modern public education indoctrinating our children with secularism, humanism, and now, socialism and communism, Webster said, "In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed...No truth is more important to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
Webster told this new nation, "The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all of our civil constitutions and all laws."
And he said, "The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His Apostles, which enjoins humility, piety, and benevolence; which acknowledges in every person a brother, a sister, or a citizen with equal rights. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free Constitutions of Government."
The war fueled by secularism against Webster and the other Founding Fathers' beliefs is a war of opposition against their deeply held Christian beliefs. Beliefs that created and for a century and a half sustained what has become the greatest nation in the history of the world.
Under the Pharisaical virtue signaling of so-called "education," the Left is trying to choke the life of our country with their secular humanism and cultural Marxism.
I'm reminded of another Founding Father's belief: Patrick Henry.
He said, "When people forget God, tyrants forge their chains."
The sounds of the blacksmith in public education are not those of teaching our children the founding principles of this nation; it is the tyrant forging chains.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.