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41 Child. Legal Rts. J. 27 (2021)
Does Teaching Yoga to Children in Public Schools Violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment

handle is hein.journals/clrj41 and id is 32 raw text is: Does Teaching Yoga to Children in Public Schools Violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment? Sejal Singht I. INTRODUCTION Teaching yoga and mindfulness to children is a trend on the rise. The percentage of U.S. children ages four to seventeen that practice yoga more than doubled from 2012 to 2017, while the percentage of children that meditate increased roughly nine-fold during the same period.1 The rise is due in part to America's schools establishing more yoga and mindfulness programs. A 2015 study found three dozen different yoga organizations offering yoga programs in 940 K-12 schools across the country.2 However, yoga's rise in popularity has led to a backlash. Schools have faced an increasing number of lawsuits from concerned parents on the grounds that offering yoga programs in schools violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by promoting Eastern religions.3 These First Amendment challengers argue that yoga is inherently religious and cannot be separated from the Hindu religion.4 But for many people, yoga is entirely secular and undertaken to improve physical and mental health. Moreover, many school-based yoga programs have successfully structured their classes to separate the physical aspects of yoga from its religious aspects, thereby offering children a beneficial option for improving their physical and mental health. This article argues that yoga programs in public schools and state-run facilities, unlike school prayers, should be upheld as constitutional under the Establishment Clause if the programs are sufficiently modified from yoga's religious roots. In exploring this issue, this article will discuss the benefits of yoga and mindfulness for children. It will also compare the origins of yoga to contemporary yoga in the United States. This will be followed by a discussion of the Establishment Clause and how courts determine whether a state activity violates the Establishment Clause under the Lemon test. The article concludes with an analysis of cases challenging yoga and meditation programs in public schools and discusses why courts agree yoga is not inherently religious if sufficiently separated from its roots in the Hindu religion. T Sejal Singh is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at St. John's University. She was previously a law guardian at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, where she represented children in abuse and neglect proceedings, termination of parental rights trials, kinship legal guardianship proceedings, and mediations. 1 LINDSEY I. BLACK ET AL., NAT'L CTR. FOR HEALTH STATS., NCHS DATA BRIEF, No. 324, USE OF YOGA, MEDITATION, AND CHIROPRACTORS AMONG U.S. CHILDREN AGED 4-17 YEARS (2018), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db324-h.pdf. 2 Bethany Butzer et al., School-based Yoga Programs in the United States: A Survey, 29 ADVANCES MIND- BODY MED. 1 (2015). 3 See infra Part VI; see also Matthew Moriarty et al., Yoga and the First Amendment: Does Yoga Promote Religion? FED. LAW. 69,74 (2013). 4 See infra Part VI.

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