A holiday season door-decorating contest in South Carolina’s York School District 1 was not hijacked for religious purposes, thanks to the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

A concerned district community member informed the state/church watchdog that for Hunter Street Elementary School’s holiday door-decorating contest, one teacher displayed a Christian nativity scene on her door along with the verse, “For Unto Us A Savior Is Born.”

FFRF wrote to the district to make certain that this First Amendment violation was corrected.

“To protect students’ First Amendment rights, the district must ensure this display is removed, as well as any other religious displays it becomes aware of in its schools,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Charlotte R. Gude stated in the letter. “The district cannot allow promotion of religion on the walls of its schools.”

The district breached the Constitution when it allowed its schools to display religious symbols or messages, FFRF emphasized. It is well settled that public schools may not show favoritism toward or coerce belief or participation in religion. By permitting the display of explicitly religious imagery and a message declaring Jesus was born for “us,” York School District 1 violated this basic constitutional prohibition by signaling clear favoritism toward religion over nonreligion, and Christianity over all other faiths.

Nearly a quarter of the state’s population is not Christian, with 16 percent identifying as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” FFRF points out.

Thankfully, it did not take long for the district to listen to FFRF and rectify its mistake.

Just two days after FFRF’s letter, Superintendent Heath Branham emailed back, confirming that action had been taken.

“The display referenced in your letter has been removed,” Branham wrote. “We appreciate you notifying us and consider the matter resolved.”

FFRF is proud to see its work make another school district a more welcoming place for all students.

“By using the door-decorating contest as a means to push her religion, one teacher turned a fun event into a proselytizing environment that signaled Christian students were favored over all others,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “Young and impressionable elementary school students are a captive audience whose right to be free from religious indoctrination in the public school setting must be scrupulously honored.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 42,000 members across the country, including hundreds of members in South Carolina. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

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