Parents of children enrolled at a parochial school in Centre County, Pennsylvania, along with the Religious Rights Foundation of Pennsylvania, a religious liberty nonprofit, filed a federal lawsuit against their local school district on July 10, 2023. Parents claimed the State College Area School District has discriminated against their children by denying them access to extracurricular activities due to their religious faith.
The district, which serves nearly 7,000 students and is located near Penn State University, provides numerous extracurricular activities for enrolled students, including athletics, “student government, special interest and service clubs, dramatic performances, [and] literary publications.” Despite the district’s obvious disdain for charter schools and its onerous requirements for homeschool students, Pennsylvania law requires school districts to make extracurricular activities available to charter school or homeschool students who reside within them.
In defiance of the law, however, children within the district who attend the approximately 10 private religious schools in the area have been subjected to a “longstanding practice” of exclusion from extracurricular activities. The plaintiffs made multiple informal attempts to ensure their children could access extracurricular activities, but the district repeatedly denied them. Parochial school parents within the district created the Religious Rights Foundation to address this instance of religious discrimination, but its founders hope it can be a resource in future cases as well.
According to Thomas More Society Special Counsel Thomas Breth, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, the district’s longstanding practice means that, to his knowledge, students at religious schools within the district have never
