Blue Ridge High School is a small public school located in a rural town in Georgia where a good portion of the town’s inhabitants are faith-based. The school had always had clubs that were faith-based or promoted some type of religious activity as most of the students attended the local church and were part of youth groups there. Unlike other clubs, any religiously-affiliated clubs at the school were not allowed to promote their clubs on the morning news. The students could only promote the club through informing other students face-to-face. Students and their parents who were atheists had never been bothered by the religious activity on school grounds as the school itself did not promote the religious clubs, just the students who were members.
However, that changed in 2022 when a group of girls at the high school formed a new religious club called God’s Daughters. The girls created the club with the intent to attract other religious girls at the high school to practice their faith through prayer sessions on every Thursday morning and volunteer activities after school. As with any club, the girls had gotten permission from the school principal to be able to hold club meetings on school grounds, and they had also found a teacher to support the club, Mrs. Kennedy.
A woman of faith herself, Mrs. Kennedy attended the local church and had gone on many mission trips sponsored by the church. However, she never talked about her faith on the school campus as, being an English teacher, her only purpose was to educate the students about grammar and writing techniques.
After the girls formed the club and convinced Mrs. Kennedy to run it, they began promoting it by texting their friends and mentioning to students at other clubs’ meetings. Mrs. Kennedy also decided to get in on promoting the religious club, talking to her students about it at the beginning of class periods and asking them to join. When the school heard about how she was also promoting the club, they didn’t say or do anything, as they had no issues with teachers promoting other non religious clubs in the past.
Parents of atheist students heard about the new club at the school but didn’t think anything of it until they heard a teacher was promoting it. Angered by this, several of the parents decided to sue the school, claiming that their children’s First Amendment rights had been violated as the school was “establishing religion” since a teacher was promoting the club and encouraging the students to explore religion.
Both the trial court and the Court of Appeals of Georgia ruled in favor of the school, saying that no First Amendment rights had been violated. The parents then took their case to the Supreme Court.