The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit yesterday (August 10) ruled that the Montgomery County Public Schools' policy limiting distribution of materials to school children contained insufficient safeguards against discrimination based on viewpoint, thus violating the First Amendment. The Court said, ". . . to withstand constitutional scrutiny under the Free Speech Clause, the government's access policy also must provide safeguards sufficient to ensure viewpoint neutrality."
The Court found no evidence that Child Evangelism Fellowship or any other group had been denied flier distribution based on viewpoint, but expressed concern about parts of the flier policy that might allow such discrimination.

Board of Education President Charles Haughey expressed disappointment with the Court’s ruling. “My colleagues on the Board and I must now determine an approach that comports with the Court’s opinion,” he said.

"Clearly we will have to review our policy in light of the Court's comments,” said Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, “but I continue to believe that the volume of material, unrelated to school, delivered home through the time and energy of our staff and students, must be limited."

The current Board policy was adopted to limit the volume of information, not directly related to school, the distribution of which had become burdensome for teachers and intruded on valuable instructional time.

Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maryland (CEF) sponsors Good News Clubs, "a Bible-centered, world-wide organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ." CEF sued the school system for failing to distribute club recruitment fliers to children to take home. A prior decision by the federal court found that using public school teachers to distribute fliers to public school children to take home would not violate separation of church and state as the school system had feared.