Nearly 60 Years Since Abington Case Changed Public School in U.S.

ABINGTON, PA — Last month marked nearly six decades since a case that began in this Montgomery County community helped spark a change in schools across the nation.

On June 17, 1963, the United States Supreme Court decided in the case of Abington School District v. Schempp that school-sponsored Bible lessons in public schools in the U.S. was unconstitutional.

The case began in 1958 when local parent Edward Schempp filed a federal lawsuit against the Abington School District to prohibit the enforcement of a then-state-law requiring public school students to listen to, and sometimes read, portions of the Bible.

Schempp, who had two students in the local school system, claimed this forced teaching violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution with regard to an establishment of religion.

A federal trial court judge agreed with Schempp, but the Abington School District appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court agreed to hear the case, but in the meantime the Pennsylvania General Assembly had amended the state law allowing for students to be exempt from Bible readings with written parental consent.

Schempp, however, pressed on with his case at the Supreme Court, arguing that the amending of the law was not good enough, and the justices eventually agreed with him, striking down the entirety of the Pennsylvania statute.

According to a 2013 article in The Atlantic, which was published around the time of the 50th anniversary of the case, Pennsylvania was not the only state who had such a Bible-reading law on its books at the time – three dozen other states had similar statutes.

This past December, Theodore R. Mann, a local lawyer who had worked on the Schempp case early in his career, died at 92 years old in a Philadelphia hospital, the Washington Post reported.

And early next month, Ellery Schempp, who was the teenage student at the heart of the case at the time, is set to turn 81 years old. He reportedly ended up having a successful career as a physicist.

It has now been 58 years since what started out as a school controversy in the Philadelphia suburb of Abington ended up changing the face of public education forever.