When his fifth-grade daughter brought a Bible home from Smithville Upper Elementary School, it struck Kenneth J. Geniuk as a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.
A year later, in December 2003, the scenario repeated itself. This time, Geniuk's son brought home a Bible. So Geniuk turned to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The result was a recent consent decree in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, in which the Smithville R-2 School District agreed not to facilitate distribution of Bibles on school premises. The ACLU announced the decree Thursday.
According to the Smithville district, it had a long-standing practice of allowing The Gideons International to distribute Bibles. In recent years, including the instances at Smithville Upper Elementary that involved Geniuk's children, students have been told they can pick up copies in the office if they wished.
The Gideons Web site says the group distributes more than 59 million Bibles worldwide each year. The group's headquarters is in Nashville, Tenn.
Gideons executive director Jerry Burden declined to comment on the Smithville consent decree.
Burden also declined to discuss the group's use of public schools to help fulfill its mission to disseminate Bibles. That practice has riled parents elsewhere. A parent in Mobile, Ala., lodged a complaint in March against a school there for allowing the Gideons to distribute Bibles, according to The Associated Press.
Like the parent in the Mobile case, Geniuk said the Gideons Bible was different from the one he prefers.
But more important, he said, was his belief that the district was acting improperly. “That's just not the forum to do it,” he said.
Geniuk said he complained to a school secretary after his daughter had arrived home with the Bible. The secretary, he said, told him she would pass on his concerns to the principal.
Neither the principal nor district officials knew about Geniuk's complaint until hearing from the ACLU in March, said assistant superintendent George Curry.
The ACLU put Geniuk in touch with attorney Larry M. Schumaker, who represented the 31-year-old father.
Schumaker and Geniuk pushed for the consent decree, which was issued May 19, in large part to put other districts on notice that they must maintain strict neutrality in religious matters.
The consent decree is effective as long as Geniuk has children in the district, but Curry expected the district would comply after that as well. “We feel … it's a practice we don't want to participate in.”