Editorial: Everett Schools can stick with rules for Bible program

Published 1:30 am Friday, December 12, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

A public meeting of the Everett School Board, with no formal action taken, still brought to a head a conflict between Everett Public Schools and an off-campus religious instruction program called LifeWise Academy that once a week picks up students at Emerson Elementary School in south Everett at midday during lunch and recess periods for once-a-week voluntary Bible-based instruction.

The optional program, begun earlier this year, operates under a 1952 Supreme Court decision that allows off-site religious instruction with state guidance intended to limit disruption of the school day.

But initial mixed reaction to the program has tilted negatively more recently with notification that the LifeWise program has objected to some of the rules in place and has threatened a lawsuit if the school district doesn’t retract those guidelines.

District parents and others responded with dozens attending Tuesday’s regularly scheduled meeting, with many applauding and cheering one board member who expressed his clear opposition to the program as well as comments from others.

As reported Thursday by The Herald’s Will Geschke, Board Member Charles Adkins, making clear he was speaking on his own behalf and not for the board, admitted that opposition, as alleged in a letter to the district from LifeWise attorneys that the board’s action were directed by animus.

“I want to make it extremely, abundantly clear that yes, I do in fact hold animus toward LifeWise Academy, as do many of the parents and families who have reached out to this board,” Adkins said Tuesday, citing what he called efforts to bring about “authoritarian theocracy” and its financial support from the conservative Heritage Foundation.

In an email to The Herald, Jeremy Dys, an attorney working with LifeWise and First Liberty Institute, said it was continuing its communication with the district to seek a resolution, but noted:

“It’s shocking how angrily one or more board members and some community members have denounced the decision of parents in the District to seek release time religious instruction for their children and how adamant they are that these parents must be stopped by school officials from directing the religious education of their children,” Dys wrote.

But any anger — or animus — by board or community members isn’t directed at parents seeking to have their children participate in the LifeWise program; it’s directed at a religious program that isn’t content with the access that it has been provided within reasonable rules meant to protect not just its First Amendment rights but also those of all in the district; parents, students, teachers and staff.

The board and district are following state and federal laws, under the guidance of their legal counsel.

Here’s the arrangement: No child is being denied participation in LifeWise, despite the potential — if not the certainty — for some degree of disruption of the school day for those children whose parents don’t grant permission for their children to join in the religious instruction. Indeed, the midday coming-and-going of students appears intended as distraction and attention to a “special program” that would be less noticeable and disruptive — and also, more helpful to working parents — if offered after school.

The district voices no opposition or support of the off-campus program, but has set rules meant to maintain as stated, “a safe, respectful learning environment for all students” that honors all parents’ rights regardless of whether their child does or does not participate in LifeWise.

LifeWise, First Liberty and its supporters believe that requiring a signed permission slip before each weekly excused absence — and this is an absence from the school day, even if only for lunch and recess times — is too “burdensome” or “draconian” a requirement. But students and parents have — since the scholastic innovation of the field trip — have long ago adjusted to the “burden” of the permission slip; forgetting the slip and missing out on an anticipated activity provides a life lesson in being prepared, following rules and learning from consequences.

In the same manner, there’s nothing burdensome in requesting kids keep the religious program’s handouts, treats and gifts in backpacks upon returning to classes.

Everett is not the first school district to have to draw this line. Several school districts in Ohio have put policies in place this year — following passage of a state law signed by its Republican governor — for students who participate in LifeWise programs to stow candy, stickers and other gifts handed out to prevent distractions and conflicts among students. LifeWise attorneys are threatening lawsuits in Ohio, too.

Again, limiting the potential for distraction is within the district’s responsibility for ensuring focus is maintained on the school day. For all students, this is school; not a marketing opportunity for a religious program. The goodies can stay in the backpacks.

Yet, in the opinion of LifeWise’s Dys, such a rule is a restriction of free speech and religious liberty.

“This is a bad thing. And if you don’t correct that, you’re going to result in some very serious litigation that is not going to be fun for anybody,” Dys told an Ohio news service.

The district’s actions, in following laws and guidelines, do not — as a letter to the school board by First Liberty and the Seattle law firm representing it alleged — reflect an “animus toward religion”; certainly less so than LifeWise’s threats of legal action reflect an animus toward public education.

And the threat of lawsuit may be part of a larger campaign, as Geschke explains in his report, noting that an organization called the Secular Education Association urged the Everett school district in an open letter to resist threats to change its policies.

“We have seen these patterns in more than a few states, and Everett is now experiencing the same tactics: claims that long-standing procedures are ‘new rules’; pressure to relax safety protocols; accusations of ‘discrimination’ when districts enforce neutral, uniform policies,” SEA says in the letter.

Recognizing that LifeWise and First Liberty may see the dispute with Everett Public Schools as a new battlefront in the culture wars — and a fundraising opportunity, to boot — some care by the district in sticking to its established and legally justifiable policies is necessary.

The pique by LifeWise and its attorneys over following reasonable rules offers an opportunity for a teachable moment in civics, namely the tension of rights and responsibilities contained within the First Amendment and its implied wall of separation between church and state, noted by more than one member of the public at Tuesday’s meeting.

Those who chafe at the phrase will insist the words “separation of church and state” are not found in the Constitution or the Bill or Rights. Indeed, they are not. Yet, the principle has been upheld in court precedent and American tradition and reflects the founders’ sentiments behind the First Amendment. Specifically, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, explained one of that amendment’s intents: that “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

That wall serves as protection for the religious beliefs and philosophical convictions of all Americans of all faiths and belief systems; in schools it protects young minds still under development.