Court Case Puts Focus on Parochial-School Teachers

As the U.S. Supreme Court opens its new term this week, one of the first cases the justices will hear pits churches and religious schools against the federal government and civil rights groups.

The high court is being asked to decide whether teachers at parochial schools—at least those who have a role in the religious formation of children—fall under a doctrine that exempts church ministers from protection under federal anti-discrimination laws.

The justices could rule narrowly on the scope of the “ministerial exception,” a legal principle developed in lower courts over many years but never ruled on by the high court. Or—as the U.S. solicitor general has urged—they could issue a broad decision that no such categorical exception exists, and that discrimination disputes between churches and employees with religious functions should be examined by courts on a case-by-case basis.

“This is a very important religious-freedom case,” said Richard W. Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, who helped write a friend-of-the-court brief on the side of a number of church-related organizations. “This case gives the court the chance to affirm some very important principles at the heart of the separation of church and state.”

There are some 314,000 teachers in U.S. religious schools at the precollegiate level, the National Center for Education Statistics said in a report this year. However, it’s not clear under current court interpretations whether all of those teachers would fall under the ministerial exception.

The case of Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School v. Perich (No. 10-553) is the only one on the court’s 2011-12 docket, so far, that directly involves a school. But the justices will other hear other cases of interest to educators, and other important K-12 legal issues could yet be added this term, such as students’ Internet speech rights and affirmative action in college admissions.

Concerns Over Narcolepsy

The church case involves Hosanna-Tabor, a Lutheran congregation in Redford, Mich. The school hired Cheryl Perich, now 57, as a lay kindergarten teacher in 1999. By 2000 she had become a “called teacher”—one with formal training in Lutheran doctrine ...

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