Under Legal Pressure, San Diego Schools Delay Vaccine Mandate With No Religious Exemptions

Protesters demonstrate outside of the San Diego Unified School District office against a vaccination mandate for students in San Diego, Calif., on Sept. 28, 2021. Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

The San Diego Unified School District decided on May 24 to postpone for a second time its policy requiring students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as opponents press forward with a federal lawsuit against the district.

Paul Jonna, Thomas More Society special counsel and partner at LiMandri and Jonna LLP, hailed the decision to delay the mandate as a victory.

“We welcome this course of action, which represents another significant victory for these families and their students, most of whom will now be able to have normal senior years and graduate from high school,” Jonna said in a statement.

The mandate, which was to take effect in July, will be delayed until July 2023 or later. The school district, which previously delayed the mandate, is one of the few in the United States that requires students to receive the vaccine for in-person instruction while not offering a religious exemption for schoolchildren.

The extensively litigated case went before the Supreme Court three months ago, as The Epoch Times previously reported. On Feb. 18, the high court denied an application to halt the mandate after the school district postponed it at that time but invited the litigants to seek an injunction in the future “if circumstances warrant.” The court order states: “Because respondents have delayed implementation of the challenged policy, and because they have not settled on the form any policy will now take, emergency relief is not warranted at this time.”

While the Supreme Court has generally been reluctant to block mandates requiring people to accept COVID-19 vaccinations, the court has been willing to curtail pandemic-related restrictions when religious freedoms have been threatened.

The new postponement decision took place days after attorneys from the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm that focuses on religious freedom, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction (pdf) against the mandate in federal court and one day before the school district’s response to the motion was due. The motion is scheduled to be heard on June 15 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

The Thomas More Society and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty have been representing a group of families who sued the school district and its board of education over its policy that required students to obtain the controversial vaccines, while explicitly disallowing exemptions for sincerely held religious objections. Those who object say they disapprove of the vaccines because they were tested using human fetal cell lines.

The school district’s policy would have forced students to take the vaccine and violate their faith, or stand firm and skip the vaccine but withdraw from all extracurricular activities and return to independent, online study.

Jonna said in one ruling in the case, 11 judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit dissented from a decision not to provide emergency relief for students with religious objections to the mandate, arguing the mandate should be immediately struck down, given its constitutional shortcoming. A few weeks later, he said, when the Supreme Court was ready to invalidate the San Diego school mandate, the district halted the policy, prompting the high court to decide not to intervene.

“The school board’s decision to postpone the mandate earlier this year was likely made in order to evade Supreme Court review,” Jonna said. Soon after, the district decided to reimpose the mandate as of July 2022.

“Thus, we immediately filed yet another motion seeking injunctive relief–set for hearing June 15, 2022,” Jonna said. “But the district is pulling its mandate, yet again–likely because it realizes, once again, that the mandate would be struck down in court.”

The district’s own evidence shows that there is no widespread classroom transmission of the virus and that other mitigation measures appear to work to protect against spread. As well, 80 percent of the students are vaccinated, so there is no justification for refusing to accommodate students with religious objections, he said.

“Thus the San Diego Unified School District has no legal or factual way to justify imposing a mandate that offers no exemptions for students with sincere religious objections.”

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Jonna said although the playing field has tilted against the school district, it’s important to move forward with the lawsuit, given the district’s tactics.

“This mandate is basically dead at this point,” Jonna said.

“There is no way they can justify this mandate. And we want to depose all of the key personnel. ... It seems their medical experts have all backed off.

“At this point, what they should do is just agree to offer protections for students with religious objections and agree that any future mandate would have that protection. But absent some clear agreement to that effect, we’re just going to push forward with the case.”

Jonna said the new delay of the mandate is “a significant victory for now because many of our clients will now be able to graduate from high school without this mandate affecting them. So it is a big deal.”

The school district didn’t respond by press time to requests for comment.