Facts
- Nashala Hearn, a minor, attended a school in Muskogee Public School District 020; her father, Eyvine Hearn, sued on her behalf.
- Nashala is Muslim and wore a hijab as part of her sincere religious practice.
- The district enforced a dress code barring certain headwear inside the building (such as hats, caps, bandannas, and hoods), but the written policy did not specifically mention hijabs.
- The district’s dress-code practice allowed some head coverings for nonreligious reasons on a case-by-case basis (including medical-related reasons), but school officials refused to allow Nashala’s hijab as a religious accommodation.
- Nashala wore her hijab at school for roughly a month without reported material disruption.
- On September 11, 2003 (the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks), school officials told Nashala she could no longer wear the hijab at school.
- After Nashala continued wearing the hijab, the school suspended her twice in October 2003 under the dress-code policy.
- Plaintiffs filed a federal civil rights action in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma seeking declaratory and injunctive relief and nominal damages, alleging constitutional violations tied to religion and speech.
- The United States intervened as a plaintiff-intervenor and participated in summary-judgment briefing, arguing that the district’s actions violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and also implicated First Amendment protections.
- The case ended without a published merits opinion; the parties resolved the dispute through a court order entered under seal and a stipulated dismissal, followed by later compliance filings.
Issues
- Whether the district’s refusal to allow a Muslim student to wear a hijab—while allowing discretionary nonreligious exceptions to its dress code—constituted religion-based unequal treatment in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
- Whether enforcing the dress code to bar the hijab burdened the student’s free exercise of religion where the policy was applied with discretionary exceptions rather than as a uniform rule.
- Whether prohibiting the hijab restricted protected student expression absent evidence of material disruption or other legally sufficient grounds.
Decision
- The matter concluded by settlement rather than a published judicial opinion on the merits.
- The docket reflects a stipulated dismissal in May 2004 and a sealed court order entered in June 2004.
- Post-resolution filings included multiple certificates of compliance, indicating ongoing reporting obligations tied to the sealed order.
- Public summaries of the resolution describe the district as agreeing to allow the student to wear her hijab and to address dress-code enforcement so religious head coverings would not be treated less favorably than comparable secular exceptions.
Legal Principles
- The Equal Protection Clause bars public-school officials from treating religious practice worse than comparable secular conduct without adequate constitutional justification.
- A policy that contains discretionary, case-by-case exceptions may be challenged when those exceptions are granted for secular reasons but denied for religious reasons.
- Student religious dress can also function as protected expression; restrictions ordinarily require more than speculation and are harder to justify where the record shows no material disruption.
- The Establishment Clause does not require a public school to suppress students’ private religious expression; allowing individual religious attire is generally distinct from school endorsement of religion.
- A settlement or consent order resolves the parties’ dispute but does not create the kind of precedential “holding” found in a published merits decision.
Conclusion
Eyvine Hearn, on behalf of his daughter Nashala, challenged a public school district’s application of a dress code that barred her Muslim hijab despite discretionary allowances for some nonreligious head coverings. The United States intervened and supported claims grounded in equal protection and related First Amendment protections. The case ended through a sealed consent-based resolution and stipulated dismissal, followed by compliance reporting, with public accounts indicating the district agreed to permit religious head coverings and to change its dress-code enforcement to prevent religion-based disparate treatment.