The Texas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval Friday to a mandatory list of books that all public schools will teach starting in 2030, paring down an earlier version students and educators had criticized for being too long, lacking diversity and emphasizing Christianity.

The majority-Republican board voted 9-5 to approve the reading list, which the group will have a chance to revise ahead of final approval set for June. All five Democrats on the board voted against the list.

The board had on the list in January to allow for more time to review the proposal.

A required the Texas Education Agency to design the list of reading materials for public K-12 students. The agency initially recommended roughly 300 books for consideration, far exceeding the requirement of at least one literary work in each grade.

The original list included childhood favorites across a range of genres — from Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat to S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders — while also incorporating biblical material such as The Parable of the Prodigal Son and The Road to Damascus. In addition to the lack of religious diversity, critics raised concerns about the underrepresentation of women as well as Hispanic and Black authors.

The revised list, proposed by Republican member Keven Ellis of Lufkin, cut about 100 readings — including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frederick Douglass’ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? — though it still includes Bible texts.

“There are other states, many other states, who have recommended reading lists,” Ellis said. “To my knowledge, there is not one that will have a required reading list as robust as this, that will be common for every student across the state.”

The Texas Education Agency created the original proposal after reviewing books used by other states and organizations. The agency has also said it factored in survey responses from roughly 5,700 teachers, noting that the list contained fewer books than what educators said they currently use.

But during hours of public testimony this week, educators said they considered the survey insufficient because teachers did not review or revise the reading list before the education agency submitted it to the State Board of Education.

They pointed to a different survey of more than 2,600 educators conducted by the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. The survey concluded that in all but one grade, it would be “mathematically impossible” to read and teach the full list during the typical 36 instructional weeks in a school year.

“I believe that an acceptable list would be one that’s created with teacher expertise, leaning on the strengths of everyone involved in this work,” said Markesha Tisby, president of Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. “There’s still time. There’s no prize for making this decision quickly. We have time to build something great for our Texas students, and they deserve it.”

The public has not yet weighed in on the revised list the board preliminarily approved Friday.

Member Julie Pickren, R-Pearland, said she was shocked to see writings from Douglass and Booker T. Washington removed. Republican Brandon Hall of Aledo said he views the list as a “starting place.” Members will have opportunities to suggest changes and offer feedback before the final vote in June.

Supporters of the list have said they believe the biblical material will help students better grasp the influence of Christianity in U.S. history. Meanwhile, at least one critic called the original list and its biblical material “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” while many stressed the importance of students needing to see themselves reflected in the books they read.

“As a recent graduate of the Texas public school system, I care deeply about the curriculum my friends and family will be taught,” said Sumya Paruchuri, a freshman at the University of North Texas.

“The best taught English classes that I had were when the teachers were passionate about the text they were teaching, whether they were fans of the work or understood the educational opportunities they presented for students,” Paruchuri added. “The required reading list’s attempt to standardize readings is unhelpful and counterproductive to the real needs of students and educators.”

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A federal appeals court next year will hear Texas’ arguments against a ruling that blocked several school districts from displaying posters of the Ten Commandments.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Jan. 20  both the Texas case and a similar case happening in Louisiana, which was the first state to pass a requirement to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

The Texas lawsuit is one of several cases that families of various religious and nonreligious backgrounds have brought forward challenging the state’s Ten Commandments law. Two federal district judges have blocked more than two dozen Texas school districts from complying with the law, saying that the legislation is unconstitutional.

The rulings in both cases only apply to the 25 school districts named in the lawsuits. The attorney general’s office has sued the Round Rock, Leander and Galveston school districts for allegedly not complying with the law as arguments over its constitutionality proceed in federal court.

Attorneys representing the families and the attorney general’s office have argued in court over the role Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played in developing the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which protects people’s freedom of religion.

Both parties have debated the influence of the Ten Commandments on the country’s legal and educational systems, and whether the version of the Ten Commandments required to go up in schools belongs to a particular religious group. They have also sparred over whether the law reflects an attempt by Texas officials to coerce students into adhering to Judeo-Christian principles.

Texas’ Ten Commandments law was one of the passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature earlier this year. Critics say the law inappropriately injects religion into the state’s public schools, attended by roughly 5.5 million children.

Here are the latest details about the cases against the law:

The latest

U.S. District Judge Orlando L. Garcia on Nov. 18 ordered 14 districts to remove the posters from classroom walls by Dec. 1. Garcia concluded that the law “makes it impossible” for children to avoid the Ten Commandment displays. He noted that districts have a “strong incentive” to comply with the law, citing the state’s against the Galveston school district for its alleged noncompliance.

In August, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery blocked 11 other school districts from posting the Ten Commandments. Biery concluded that the law favors Christianity over other faiths, is not neutral with respect to religion and is likely to interfere with families’ “exercise of their sincere religious or nonreligious beliefs in substantial ways.”

“There are ways in which students could be taught any relevant history of the Ten Commandments without the state selecting an official version of scripture, approving it in state law, and then displaying it in every classroom on a permanent basis,” Biery wrote in his opinion, adding that the law “crosses the line from exposure to coercion.”

Texas appealed Biery’s ruling, sending the case to the same court where a three-judge panel Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law from taking effect. Texas requested that all 17 active judges on the court hear the case, as opposed to a three-judge panel.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and a coalition of religious freedom organizations are representing the families in both cases. Attorneys had expressed hope that other districts would not implement the law, but they later told the court in a legal filing that many districts are implementing it or have signaled an intent to do so.

Soon after Biery’s ruling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called on every school district not blocked by the courts from posting the Ten Commandments to follow the law. Paxton has sued the Galveston, Round Rock and Leander school districts for allegedly not complying. The Leander district pushed back, saying it is in compliance.

The background

, by Republican Sen. of Weatherford, the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms on donated posters sized at least 16 by 20 inches. Gov. signed the law in late June, the day after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found a similar law in Louisiana was “plainly unconstitutional.” The court ruled that requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments would cause an “irreparable deprivation” of First Amendment rights. An Arkansas judge ruled similarly in a separate case.

Supporters argue that the Ten Commandments and teachings of Christianity broadly are vital to understanding U.S. history, a controversial message that has resurged in recent years as part of a broader national movement to undermine the long-held interpretation of church-state separation. Texas GOP lawmakers have in recent years to further codify their conservative religious views, a trend.

“This issue is likely to get to the United States Supreme Court,” Biery, the judge, told a San Antonio courtroom prior to opening arguments in one of the Texas cases.

Biery’s August ruling blocking the law from taking full effect applied to the following school districts: Alamo Heights, North East, Lackland, Northside, Austin, Lake Travis, Dripping Springs, Houston, Fort Bend, Cypress-Fairbanks and Plano.

The latest ruling from Garcia blocks the law in the following districts: Comal, Georgetown, Conroe, Flour Bluff, Fort Worth, Arlington, McKinney, Frisco, Northwest, Azle, Rockwall, Lovejoy, Mansfield, McAllen.

Two of those districts — Arlington and McAllen — are no longer part of the lawsuit but agreed to follow the court’s rulings.

Another group of parents in Dallas during the summer. That lawsuit does not appear to have made any meaningful progress. A judge has threatened to dismiss the case if the plaintiffs do not provide required legal documents to the defendants by Dec. 1.

What are the plaintiffs saying

Oral arguments in the first Texas case,, concluded in August, several weeks after 16 families represented by the religious freedom organizations sued the state over what their lawyers called “catastrophically unconstitutional” legislation.

“Posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is un-American and un-Baptist,” Griff Martin, a pastor, parent and plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “S.B. 10 undermines the separation of church and state as a bedrock principle of my family’s Baptist heritage. Baptists have long held that the government has no role in religion — so that our faith may remain free and authentic.”

The lawyers made a similar argument during a November hearing for , the latest legal filing, which includes more than a dozen new families.

In the lawsuit brought by the North Texas parents, the plaintiffs, who identify as Christian, said the law was unconstitutional and violated their right to direct their children’s upbringing.

One of them, a Christian minister, said the displays will offer a message of religious intolerance, “implying that anyone who does not believe in the state’s official religious scripture is an outsider and not fully part of the community.” That message, the minister argued, conflicts with the religious, social justice and civil rights beliefs he seeks to teach his kids.

Another North Texas plaintiff, a mother of two, is worried she will be “forced” to have sensitive and perhaps premature conversations about topics like adultery with her young children — and also “does not desire that her minor children to be instructed by their school about the biblical conception of adultery,” the suit states.

The plaintiffs in the ACLU suits come from diverse religious backgrounds, including families who are nonreligious. Allison Fitzpatrick said in a statement that she fears her children will think they are violating school rules because they don’t adhere to commandments like honoring the Sabbath.

“The state of Texas has no right to dictate to children how many gods to worship, which gods to worship, or whether to worship any gods at all,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which brought the lawsuit alongside the ACLU.

The attorneys called the version of the Ten Commandments in SB 10 a “state-sponsored Protestant version,” which was corroborated by their witness, constitutional law professor and religious history expert Steven Green. They argued against the notion that the Ten Commandments were central to the development of the country’s legal and educational systems, which Green agreed lacked historical support.

The ACLU lawyers have also noted that students are legally required to attend school and have virtually no way to avoid seeing the state’s required version of the Ten Commandments, which they say interferes with children’s and families’ rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has already found public schools’ display of the Ten Commandments , and the attorneys have made clear that only the Supreme Court can overturn its previous rulings.

What the state is saying

The attorney general’s office has argued that the Ten Commandments are part of the nation’s history and heritage, and that previous rulings from federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court blocking the commandments from going up in classrooms did not examine that historical significance.

Attorneys for the state have noted that the Supreme Court recently shot down the test that courts previously relied on to determine when a government had unconstitutionally endorsed or established a religion. And attorneys pointed out a decades-old ruling in a Nebraska case, regarding a Ten Commandments monument on city property, where an appeals court decided in favor of the monument that displayed the same version of the commandments Texas wants to show in public schools. They relied on that ruling to make the case that SB 10 does not favor a particular religious group.

“There is no legal reason to stop Texas from honoring a core ethical foundation of our law, especially not a bogus claim about the ‘separation of church and state,’ which is a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution,” Paxton said in a recent statement.

The attorney general’s viewpoints were supported in court by Mark David Hall, a professor and author who studies religious liberty and church-state relations. Hall, the state’s expert witness, recently wrote a book that considers how “Christian Nationalism Is Not an Existential Threat to America or the Church.”

Attorney William Farrell from the attorney general’s office described SB 10’s requirement as a “passive display on the wall” that does not rise to the level of coercion because students can choose to ignore the posters if they wish. The law would “probably cross the line,” he said, if it also incorporated the Ten Commandments into lessons or assignments — but that is not the case.

The posters must only go up if they are donated to the school, he further argued, and the law does not specify what would happen if districts choose not to comply. The state views that as evidence that it poses no threat or harm to families, even though Attorney General Ken Paxton recently issued a threatening action if schools do not comply and has sued three districts for their noncompliance.

“SB 10 doesn’t restrict anything,” Farrell said. “It doesn’t exclude anything or specifically require any … participation by students.”

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In the past month or so, federal courts have dealt a string of blows to conservatives’ push for the biblical Ten Commandments to be posted in public schools.

Yet as states lose over required religious displays, many are working on another route to faith-based education by allowing kids to attend off-campus religious instruction. This year, , , and passed laws guaranteeing parents the right to have their children excused during the school day for free, off-campus religious instruction, often called “released time.”

Those four states are the latest of at least 12 that require school districts to offer released time religious schooling upon parental request, including: Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin.

The released time approach may be more likely to pass constitutional muster than other government-imposed religious efforts, experts say, by shifting influence off school grounds and under the direction of faith-based groups rather than public school teachers, and by making it free to students.

A 1952 U.S. Supreme Court decision in allows for released time religious instruction as long as it’s off school property, privately funded and parent permitted.

“Not every family has access to private or parochial school, but for many generations families have been able to take their students out of school for a portion of the day for religious education if they choose,” said Jennifer Jury, a program advocate for LifeWise Academy, an Ohio-based Christian nonprofit founded in 2018.

The organization has been active in expanding its reach and lobbying lawmakers for stronger legislative support. This school year, LifeWise expects to serve nearly 100,000 public school students across 1,100 schools in 34 states, Jury said.

The off-campus gatherings work the same way in most states: With parents’ approval, public school students sign out of school during a lunch, recess or study hall block. Students will either walk or ride one of the distinctive red LifeWise buses to a local church or a program-leased community building in town.

And depending on state limitations for the religious instruction, for either a half or full hour, kids will learn about the Bible. When the allotted time is up, students go back to their public school to finish the day.

In some states, students can earn academic credit for the off-campus instruction, which has been more controversial.

In Montana, for example, that would have required school districts to develop policies for academic credit was amended to “authorize” a district to allow credit, after pushback from the state’s school boards and school administrators associations.

“School districts should have the autonomy to determine which external coursework aligns with the academic frameworks and whether such courses should be eligible for credit,” Rob Watson, who represented the two groups at the legislature, said in his comments to a House committee in February. He noted the groups did not oppose the released time policy itself.

Despite the changes, only one Democrat in the legislature voted “yes.” Montana GOP Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law in May.

Supporters had touted the academic credit option as a way to entice homeschooling families to consider public schools. In her interview with Stateline, Jury noted similar programs that accommodate Jewish, Muslim and Mormon faith-based teaching for public school students.

“Whether a person is religious or not, the Bible is widely recognized as one of the most influential books in history,” Jury said. “A lot of our Western culture was born out of ideas that come from the Bible, like the fact that every person is created equal, that we are to love our neighbor.”

Identical bill language

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, in August adopted model legislation about released time policies that state lawmakers can propose.

��������’s would allow from one to five hours per week of off-campus religious instruction and would require school districts to award academic credit if the course meets certain criteria. Districts would have to assess instruction based on secular standards and would not be allowed to test for particular religious content, according to the model legislation.

Nearly identical language had already appeared in several state bills, including in North Carolina and West Virginia this year and in Mississippi in 2023. In North Carolina, LifeWise Academy registered with the secretary of state’s office in 2024, as by NC Newsline, and a released time bill was introduced in February. It was sent to committee but never moved ahead.

The bills in Mississippi and West Virginia also stalled.

Legislation that does become law earns praise from groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the nation’s most active legal organizations opposing abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Statements from Greg Chafuen, senior counsel for the nonprofit’s Center for Public Policy, say the new released time laws respect “parents’ educational decisions” and ensure “parents are in the driver’s seat when it comes to their kids’ education.”

An Indiana law lets high school students leave school for religious instruction each week for an amount of time equal to one elective course. Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee laws allow students to earn elective credit for released time religious instruction, though it cannot replace a “core curriculum” class. School boards can set standards for when such programs qualify for credit.

LifeWise operates in each of those states.

Ten Commandment displays

Jury, of LifeWise Academy, said her organization wants off-campus religious options for public school students to be available in all 50 states.

“It’s important to note this is an option, and parents are the ultimate decision-makers in enrollment,” she said.

“We would love to see every student in the United States have the option to attend a program like LifeWise if they want to and if their parents want them to.”

A lack of parental choice might be what trips up state efforts to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

After Louisiana last year became the first state in recent decades to require that the Ten Commandments, a central tenet of the Judeo-Christian tradition, be displayed in school classrooms, in at least 15 other states. Two states — Arkansas and Texas — enacted laws.

But for now, courts have blocked the mandates in all three states. In Texas, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery warned the displays “are likely to pressure [children] into religious observance” and undermine parents’ rights.

In Arkansas, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks the state’s requirement to post a specific version of the Ten Commandments “plainly unconstitutional.”

The law “is not neutral with respect to religion,” he wrote. “By design, and on its face, the statute mandates the display of expressly religious scripture in every public-school classroom and library.”

He also noted that the law “requires that a specific version of that scripture be used, one that the uncontroverted evidence in this case shows is associated with Protestantism and is exclusionary of other faiths.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Two months after the U.S. Supreme Court granted public school parents the right to withdraw their children from materials and discussions on LGBTQ+ issues and other subjects that conflict with their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” conservative leaders in California are predicting schools will be swamped with opt-out demands. 

That hasn’t happened yet, but attorneys agree that this latest escalation of the culture wars will likely cause turmoil, confusion, and years of litigation, largely because the court offered no guidance on how opt-out requests should be handled, how religious belief claims can or should be verified, and how schools should handle potential logistical issues.

“There is a lot of trepidation about how to handle this issue in a way that is legally compliant and doesn’t trigger a backlash from one side of the issue or the other,” Troy Flint, a spokesperson for the California School Boards Association, told EdSource via email Saturday night.

“Superintendents have concerns about how to make a fact-specific determination regarding parent requests, and we have heard of districts getting threats of litigation from both sides,” he said.

LGBTQ+ advocates and defenders of the state’s progressive school standards are threatening discrimination lawsuits if opt-outs are granted, Flint said. Parents are threatening to sue if they aren’t granted immediately.

In most districts, he added, leaders “are hesitant to address this publicly for fear of attracting more scrutiny and making the issue even more difficult to manage.”

A leading academic on education law said that while the Supreme Court decision was based on parental objections to LGBTQ+ books and lessons, the religious opt-outs are likely to have a broader reach.

“It is deeply misguided for people to believe that this case is only about LGBTQ+ and equality,” Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told EdSource. The decision “sweeps, given the prevalence of deeply felt religious objections, to lots of material,” he said.

It could “affect everything from reading to science, to literature to history. It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the decision,” Driver said. “Some people think Bert and Ernie are gay. Is ‘Sesame Street’ now suspect?”

California, for instance, requires students to learn the history of gay people fighting for civil rights and the story of the country’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk. The San Francisco supervisor was assassinated in 1978 and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama.

Flint said that parents “in at least one district have hinted at trying to expand the opt-out requests to other types of instructional materials.” He did not identify those materials.

Meanwhile, as school administrators ponder their next steps, firebrand social conservatives are seizing the moment that the nation’s highest court created.

“There should be opt-outs. There are things that go against what God laid down,” pastor Angelo Frazier, of Bakersfield’s RiverLakes Community Church, said of what’s taught in California schools. 

“It’s not education. It’s ‘You can touch me here.’ It’s very suggestive and inappropriate.” He said the ruling was a relief to frustrated parents in his congregation. “It gives them breathing room.”

The leader of a Fresno-based Christian group, long involved in parental rights advocacy, said the state is no longer in charge of what children learn in school.

The ruling shows that “parents are the ultimate determination of whose values get taught to the child,” said Greg Burt of the California Family Council. “We’re now in charge of deciding what we think is good and what we think is not good.”

But as opt-outs begin to play out across California’s more than 10,000 public schools as the 2025-26 academic year opens, the only certainty from the case,  is that uncertainties abound — and may for years.

They include:

• Can or should parents file blanket opt-out requests stating they want their child removed from any and all instruction about LGBTQ+ topics, and leave school personnel to sort it out? Or should schools ask parents to review reading lists — often available online — and let parents flag those items to which they object? 
• What do school leaders do with students whose parents opt them out of a class? Their class time still needs to be used for instruction. Where do they go?
• Who watches or instructs the youngest of removed students, who can’t be left unsupervised? Some of the books cited in the Supreme Court case, including ones about a child’s favorite uncle marrying a man and a puppy getting lost at a Pride parade, are used in kindergarten and even transitional kindergarten classes.
• Will school districts need to budget money to defend lawsuits from parents whose opt-out requests may be denied? 
• Can parents even attempt to opt out their child from exposure to an LGBTQ+ teacher, or a teacher who displays a Pride flag in a classroom?

Lawyers and academics interviewed for this story said that Justice Samuel Alito’s decision, joined by the court’s five other conservatives, offered little guidance on how opt-outs should work.  

Mahmoud v. Taylor happened because the Montgomery County schools in suburban Maryland created an opt-out program to appease parents who objected to the teaching of LGBTQ+ materials on religious grounds. But the program ended in less than a year. Alito noted in his decision that school officials found that “individual principals and teachers could not accommodate the growing number of opt-out requests without causing significant disruptions to the classroom environment.” Parents then sued.

Focusing largely on principles of religious freedom, Alito’s decision doesn’t specifically address how opt-outs might work given the Maryland situation, or how claims of a sincerely held religious belief might be evaluated. 

The high court has long recognized the rights of parents to “direct the religious upbringing of their children,” he wrote, a principle at the case’s core.

But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonja Sotomayor predicted opt-outs would cause “chaos for this nation’s public schools.”

Giving parents the chance to opt out of all lessons and story times that conflict with their beliefs “will impose impossible administrative burdens,” Sotomayor wrote. It threatens the very essence of public education.

&�Բ�����;“The reverberations of the court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations.”

Opting out in California

Conservative groups in California opposed to LGBTQ+ themed teaching materials are generating letters and emails to school districts for parents to use to demand that school leaders proactively remove children from classes where there might be any mention of gay or transgender people, same-sex marriage and other related topics.

A nonprofit Riverside County law firm, Advocates for Faith & Freedom, created calling for children to be removed from any teaching involving “gender identity, the use of pronouns inconsistent with biological sex, sexual activity or intercourse of any kind, sexual orientation, or any LGBTQ+ topics” so parents can raise children “in the fear and knowledge of the Lord.”

The letter gives principals 10 calendar days to respond in writing. Lack of a response “will be considered a denial” that will cause parents to “proceed accordingly.”  

Erin Mersino, an attorney at the firm, said via email, “responses were just starting to come in,” and that it was too soon to discuss the letter’s effectiveness. Other groups are circulating at least four similar opt-out templates or email forms.  

The 10-day response demand in the nonprofit’s letter “is insufficient in my opinion,” said Mark Bresee, a La Jolla attorney specializing in education law.

Bresee also questioned if “a blanket, year-long ‘opt-out’ demand” is consistent with Alito’s decision, noting that the justice wrote that the “religious development of a child will always be fact-intensive. It will depend on the specific religious beliefs and practices asserted, as well as the specific nature of the educational requirement or curricular feature at issue.”

It’s unclear how far and fast those letters are circulating. Some school officials said they have received a few opt-out notices.

Conservative activist Brenda Lebsack, a Santa Ana Unified School District board member, said mass opt-out requests are unlikely to come until school districts themselves notify parents of the new right the court granted. “Opt-out forms should really be coming from the schools because if you’re getting opt-out forms from all these different law firms, and they’re all different, that could get really confusing,” she said. 

At the Manteca Unified School District in San Joaquin County, Assistant Superintendent Victoria Brunn said late last week that only one “opt-out request has been received so far. She said the parents who made it were told it would be granted. 

A spokesperson for the Turlock Unified School District in Stanislaus County said it had received a single inquiry about the opt-out process and created a standard form for requests, but that no requests had been received. Parents can either use the form or email a teacher, citing&�Բ�����;“specific instructional content” a student should not receive, according to a copy provided to EdSource.

“Teachers can also provide notice of upcoming curriculum,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

At the Hope Elementary School District in Santa Barbara County, Superintendent Anne Hubbard created an opt-out form. As of Friday, it had been used once to opt out two children in the same family, she said. 

Last week, the board of the 85-student Howell Mountain Elementary School District in Napa County canceled plans to create an opt-out form after community objections.

“Howell Mountain Elementary respects and values the LGBTQ+ community. We will not be adopting any type of opt-out form that specifically targets LGBTQ+ curriculum,” Superintendent Joshua Munoz said in a statement. Instead, the district will remind parents annually that the right to opt out exists, but will not cite any specific curriculum.

 that among those who spoke to the board was a St. Helena High School junior who’d attended Howell Mountain.

“When I was in seventh grade, I realized that I liked girls,” she said. “In school, the times that we were taught about LGBTQ+ people would remind me that I was not alone. I was not a freak or an alien. I was just me. And I could still do anything I wanted in my life.”

In San Francisco, Mawan Omar, the parent of a sixth grader, told EdSource he intends to opt his son out of LGBTQ+ materials because the teaching contradicts his family’s Muslim faith.  

Omar said his son, Hezma, objected on his own to an LGBTQ+ lesson in elementary school because it was contrary to what he had learned from the Holy Quran. “He just didn’t want to be around it because he knows our religion,” Omar said. After what he described as a dispute with the school’s principal, it was agreed informally that Hezma would be allowed to leave any classes involving similar materials.  

Now, Alito’s decision, Omar said, is gratifying. “We knew all along we were right.”

But Lebsack, who focuses on transgender issues and has formed an interfaith coalition primarily around them, said Alito’s decision isn’t enough.

“I think Mahmoud versus Taylor is throwing us crumbs,” she said in an interview. “I mean, I’m grateful for it, but it needs to go much further than that.”

Lebsack, a special education teacher and former Orange County probation officer, claimed the California Department of Education is ripe to be sued under the First and 14th amendments for “compelling public school students to accept and affirm extremist ideologies of unlimited gender identities” and for “bringing extremist forced teachings into K-12 public education.”

Asked to respond to Lebsack’s assertion, a spokesperson for the state Education Department directed a reporter to guidance posted online about Alito’s decision. It states, in part, “The California Department of Education and California law continue to promote a safe, fair, and welcoming learning environment in all schools. It is important to note that Mahmoud does not invalidate or preempt California’s strong protections for LGBTQ+ youth from discrimination, harassment, and bullying.” 

The goal: Banning books?

Other conservatives said they see a path where Alito’s decision could lead to the removal of books and teaching they oppose by overwhelming schools with opt-outs to the point where the best option is to remove the materials.

“If there are so many people who want to opt out of this curriculum, maybe we should stop teaching it,” said Julie Hamill, an attorney and president of the California Justice Center. School leaders, she said, should be reflecting on whether they are “doing something wrong as a district and educational entity. Those are questions that are not being asked right now. It’s very obvious that’s what needs to happen.”

Sonja Shaw, a Chino Valley Unified School District board member running for state superintendent of public instruction in next year’s election, said she wants opt-outs to “overtax the system to where they just give up, and they stop teaching this stuff.”

If so many opt-outs were filed that books are removed from curricula, that would help, said Burt of the California Family Council, which has urged parents to flood districts with opt-outs. “We’re advocating for good books in school, and we think these are bad books, so we’re not going to be sad if we see them go.”

But an anti-censorship advocate said that would amount to book banning by a different name. 

“I’m not at all surprised that this is their plan of attack,” Tasslyn Magnusson, senior adviser to the Freedom to Read team at PEN America, an anti-censorship group, said of conservative activists. “These are books about families. These are books about how we experience the world, and they’re beautiful and well written,” she said. “Remember that it’s important for kids to have a variety of materials in front of them that resonate with their lives and their experiences.”

Another impact of the opt-outs will be how LGBTQ+ students and students from families with LGBTQ+ members will react when classmates leave and when teaching materials reflecting their lives are presented.

That could make “a child feel they’re not only different, but that they’re not accepted or that they should be ashamed of the family that they have,” said Jorge Reyes Salinas,  a spokesperson for Equality California, a civil rights group. Although the opt-outs promise to be disruptive, he said, they won’t end the state’s use of an inclusive curriculum. “We’re talking about a very small population of parents that are ignorant and full of hate.”

The presidents of California’s two largest teachers unions both said educators are not going to fold under pressure created by the high court’s decision.

“The role of the public school is to help students develop the critical thinking skills and knowledge necessary to engage in a pluralistic democracy,” said Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers. “We cannot have individuals dictating what is the good of the public. It’s also important that our public schools avoid over-compliance and refuse to capitulate to the weaponization of this decision.”

David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, said that teachers “will obviously follow the law, but we want to make it clear to our members that there are other laws in California around kids’ ability to learn about their own identity, cultures, or all kinds of identities. We’re going to still honor kids’ ability to learn about their own identity and all kinds of identities.”

Goldberg also said it would be a mistake for school administrators to place the burden of opt-outs on teachers. “Teachers are overwhelmed already, just getting through the curriculum,” he said. Opt-outs are “a compliance thing that districts are going to need to figure out.”

The Scopes Monkey Trial

The country has a long history of science clashing with religion.

Driver, the Yale law professor, noted that in a 1987 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned a lower court that ruled fundamentalist Christians could remove their children from public school lessons that depicted women working outside the home, which they argued conflicted with their religious beliefs. 

Now, following Alito’s decision in the Maryland case, the losing argument in that case could be successful, Driver said. “It seems to me the Mahmoud versus Taylor decision empowered these sorts of objections to potentially carry the day.”

Alito’s decision also came 100 years after the landmark court case on the teaching of evolution in public schools — the epic clash of science versus religion known as the Scopes Monkey Trial that pitted legendary lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan against each other. 

Jennings, hired to prosecute a high school biology teacher, John Scopes, for teaching evolution against state law, won. But Tennessee’s Supreme Court later overturned Scopes’ conviction, ruling that a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools was unconstitutional.

But it didn’t end the debate over teaching science in the face of religious beliefs, said Pepperdine University law and history professor Edward Larson, author of . When it ended, “school districts all over the country and some states banned the teaching of the theory of human evolution,” he said.

Even when religious objections were later banned, “a series of state laws and local actions calling for balanced treatment of either teaching creation science, along with evolution, or later intelligent design” followed, Larson said. Several states, including Alabama, require disclaimers in biology books stating evolution “is just a theory,” he said.

“The issue of evolution in public schools remains a flash point,” Larson said.&�Բ�����;“It has been for a hundred years, it still is today.”

As the Alito decision plays out in the coming years, Larson said, “Schools may want to force people to provide all sorts of evidence” to prove their sincerely held religious beliefs.&�Բ�����;“But I’m thinking that most won’t feel it’s worth their time to get too engaged,” he added. 

“That’s just inviting trouble.” 

Come September, every public school classroom in Texas could be required to display the Ten Commandments under a requirement that passed the Texas legislature Wednesday — part of a larger push in Texas and beyond to increase the role of religion in schools.

passed the Senate 28-3, despite a federal court ruling that a similar Louisiana law violated a constitutionally required separation of church and state.

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The bill preliminarily passed the House 88-49 on Saturday — the Jewish Sabbath day. The Ten Commandments forbids work on that day, Rep. noted in an effort to highlight legislative hypocrisy. The lower chamber’s initial approval came after more than two hours of debate and despite last-ditch Democratic efforts to water down the law, including giving school districts the opportunity to vote on the policy, and adding codes of ethics from different faiths into the bill.

On Sunday, the House passed the bill 82-46, but clarified in it that the state would be responsible for any legal fees if a school district were to be sued over the policy. The bill now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it.

Sponsored by Sen. , a Republican from Weatherford, the bill requires every classroom to visibly display a poster sized at least 16 by 20 inches. The poster can’t include any text other than the language laid out in the bill, and no other similar posters may be displayed.

“It is incumbent on all of us to follow God’s law and I think we would all be better off if we did,” Rep. , a Republican from Lucas who is carrying the bill in the House, said during the floor debate Saturday.

Supporters argue that the Ten Commandments and teachings of Christianity more generally are core to U.S. history, a message that has resurged in recent years as part of a broader national movement that considers the idea of church-state separation a myth.

That movement fueled Texas’ push to require signs if they were donated by a private foundation — signed into law in 2021. In 2024, the State Board of Education approved Bible-infused teaching materials.

This session, lawmakers have advanced bills that , and one that would require teachers to use the terms “Anno Domini” (AD) — Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” and “Before Christ” (BC) when expressing dates.

Proponents of King’s bill also say making the Ten Commandments more prominent in schools will combat what movement leaders see as a generations-long moral decline.

Texas is one of 16 states where lawmakers have pursued the Ten Commandments bills.

Although the Supreme Court , supporters in Texas and beyond find support in the current makeup of the court’s justices and in the 2019 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which found a football coach could lead prayers on the field after games.

But Robert Tuttle, a professor of religion and law at George Washington University, said allowing a private individual to pray — as in the Kennedy case — is different from displaying the Ten Commandments in the classroom.

Last June, a federal court struck down a — the first state this decade to pass such a law. The state is appealing the decision.

“The constant presence of a sacred text in the room with them is effectively telling them, ‘Hey, these are things you should read and obey,’” Tuttle said. “That’s not the state’s job — to do religious instruction.”

He also said that despite the Supreme Court trending in a more conservative direction, its decision Thursday that leaves in place a prohibition on the establishment of a could mean that the Court, for now, is not throwing out that principle.

During Texas legislative committee hearings, opponents from free speech and civil rights groups — — said the policy could send a message of exclusion to students of other faiths or those who don’t practice a religion. They also said the commandments were irrelevant to classes like math, and could prompt questions that were not age-appropriate, such as what adultery means.

The teachers union said it opposes the bill because members believe it violates the principle of separation of church and state.

“Public schools are not supposed to be Sunday school,” said spokesperson Clay Robison.

— who is studying to become a minister — raised concerns in House floor discussions Wednesday that the First Amendment forbids imposing a state-sponsored religion.

“My faith means more to me than anything, but I don’t believe the government should be forcing religion onto any American citizen, especially our children,” the Austin lawmaker told the Tribune. “I’m a Christian who firmly believes in the separation of church and state.”

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.