AG issues guidance to schools on Ten Commandments display

Amid an ongoing legal challenge, Monday is the first day in which schools can implement Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law.

Except for the five districts named in the lawsuit by the ACLU and others — East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon — all public school classrooms are now required to post the Ten Commandments.

Attorney General Liz Murrill issued guidance late last Friday afternoon:

1. A school should select, and display at its discretion, the four displays attached to this guidance letter—provided that the displays themselves or funding for the displays are donated—such that any given display may appear in any given classroom.

2.  To ensure readability, each display should be between the statutory minimum size, 11 inches by 14 inches, and 18 inches by 24 inches.

3. To avoid any possibility of confusion regarding whether displays are attributable to individual teachers, a school should place its displays on any classroom wall other than behind a teacher’s desk, podium, or location from which a teacher ordinarily delivers instruction.

4. A school should seek to place its displays among others reflecting educational content, such as those displaying the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance, see La. R.S. 25:1282.

“We’re going to have some posters that are designed that we believe meet constitutional standard, just so that schools would have some options that we think are constitutional options so that they can comply with the law,” Murrill told News Radio 710 KEEL in Shreveport in a recent interview. “The United States Supreme Court has approved the posting of the Ten Commandments in a historical context. So we know that there is a way to comply with the law and comply constitutionally.”

Murrill concedes that posting the Ten Commandments by itself without any educational context violates the First Amendment as previously interpreted by the Supreme Court.

“If somebody just posts the Ten Commandments up on the wall, they would probably get sued,” Murrill told KEEL, “and they are going to be testing Supreme Court precedent, because I don’t think that that meets the boundaries of current Supreme Court precedent.”

Murrill said it’s not in her office’s jurisdiction to prosecute school districts that fail to put up the posters in schools.

“I don’t have the power to do that,” says Murrill. “BESE does, and BESE is enjoined.”

Murrill goes on to say if individual teachers refuse to display the posters, their school boards could pursue disciplinary action against them.

“If that school district decides that they’re posting posters and teachers refuse to comply,” Murrill says, “then that’s an employment matter for the school district.”

Murrill says her office will defend any school district that gets sued over the displaying of the Ten Commandments.