Defending the cross.

State law prohibits Pennsylvania's government school teachers and certain other professional school employees from wearing religious garb in the classroom. The policy is also incorporated in the state's school code.

Brenda Nichol of Glen Campbell City in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, has since 1995 worked for Armstrong-Intermediate Unit 28 (ARIN), an agency that provides educational services to 11 school districts in Indiana and Armstrong Counties. She has, since last fall, been an instructional assistant at Penns Manor Area Elementary School in Clymer.

A committed Christian, Nichol has long expressed her faith by wearing a necklace with a one-and-a-quarter inch cross pendant. In October 1997, one of her paychecks was accompanied by a notice reminding her of the school code's policy banning teachers from wearing any "dress, mark, emblem or insignia indicating the fact that such teacher is a member or adherent of any religious order, sect or denomination."

Nichol continued to wear the cross, however, and was not hassled about it further until March 11th of this year, when she received a verbal warning from her ARIN supervisor, Robert Truscello. On April 4th, because she was still wearing the necklace, Truscello told her that she would be suspended unless she removed the cross or kept it from public view. On April 8th Truscello returned to check up on Nichol. "I did have my necklace on that day," Nichol recalled for the April 22nd Indiana Gazette. "I could not follow that code in my heart. I could not deny Christ." She was subsequently suspended for one year without pay.

On May 6th, the American Center for Law and Justice, an international public interest law firm specializing in constitutional law and religious liberty cases, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pittsburgh. The case was assigned to Judge Arthur Schwab. The suit contended that ARIN had violated Nichol's rights under the U.S. Constitution and sundry Pennsylvania statutes, including the state's Religious Freedom Protection Act.

On June 25th, Judge Schwab issued a detailed "memorandum opinion" in which he ruled that the state religious garb statute did not apply to Nichol (and would be unconstitutional even if it did), and that ARIN had no authority to broaden the law's scope to include her or other non-teachers. She was not, he wrote, "one of the enumerated professional employees designated by ... the School Code ... nor has she been 'certificated in accordance with the qualifications established by the State Board of Education.'" In issuing a temporary injunction that placed her suspension on hold, he also pointed out that there was no evidence presented by ARIN that Nichol's cross had caused any dissension or trouble between her and her students, and that Truscello, who had supervised her work for seven years, admitted that he himself had not noticed the pendant until this year.

The district judge concluded that the policy displays "hostility toward religion" and violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Judge Schwab ordered that Nichol be reinstated to her former position, with full back pay and benefits, pending a hearing (scheduled for August 28th) on her attorneys' request for a permanent injunction.