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Chapter 6 traces the impact of the Zobrest decision, as precedent, on U.S. Supreme Court Establishment Clause doctrine and on the practices of public school districts throughout the United States; and it discusses the lives of the Zobrest family since the decision. While strict separationists, such as the leaders of Americans United, predicted the decision would profoundly remake the meanings of the Establishment Clause in the critical area of the sharing of public resources with religiously affiliated schools, William Bentley Ball was closer to being correct, believing the decision would have an incremental impact, pushing the court modestly toward a less strict standard than had prevailed under the Lemon Test. The most important of the decisions growing out of the Zobrest lawsuit, Agostini v. Felton, is discussed.

This chapter traces the Zobrests’ decision-making regarding their deaf son Jim’s education from a pediatrician’s diagnosis in Erie, Pennsylvania, through Jim’s early training at the Gertrude A. Barber Center, to the family’s removal to Tucson, so that Jim could attend the Arizona School for the Deaf and the Blind, a public school. The analysis centers on the claims of competing pedagogies in deaf education: American Sign Language and socialization within Deaf culture, identity, and community and mainstreaming through Total Communication, speechreading, and Signed Exact English. The preference for mainstreaming is analyzed in the context of both a parental disposition toward complete social integration of deaf children and in the context of strong parental activism in behalf of enhancing opportunities for deaf children.

Chapter 2 examines the Zobrests’ decision-making as they sought opportunities among various school systems available to them for mainstreaming their deaf son, Jim. We follow Jim’s education from the Arizona School for the Deaf and the Blind to the Catalina Foothills public schools in suburban Tucson and analyze the Zobrests’ decision to remove Jim from the public schools and place him in Salpointe Catholic High School. The general attraction of Roman Catholic schools in the cultural and social climate of the 1980s is discussed, as is the expectation that a Catholic high school would offer a deaf-friendly educational and social environment. Jim’s IEPs, his performance in school, and his social situation, as the only deaf student in each educational setting, are analyzed.

This chapter looks at the considerable challenges that Jim Zobrest faced as he attended Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson, as the only deaf student in that elite institution. Jim’s experiment in mainstreaming did not succeed in overcoming his social isolation within the high school. The school itself largely left Jim to his own devices to succeed in this hearing environment. Jim therefore relied heavily on his interpreter, Jim Santeford, and his younger brother, Sam, to facilitate conversation with his teachers, classmates, and coaches. The kinds, methodologies, and technologies of deaf communication are also considered. Despite mostly succeeding in the classroom, Jim grew increasingly alienated from the school he and his family chose because he was unable to start on his school’s championship-caliber basketball team.

This chapter discusses the origins of the Zobrests’ lawsuit against their public school district in Tucson, which refused on constitutional grounds to pay for Jim’s sign language interpreter in a Catholic school. For the Zobrests, federal disability laws and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause entitled Jim to have this essential service. What follows is an analysis of the zigzag line of thinking employed by the U.S. Supreme Court as it grappled with church-state issues in the twentieth century prior to its consideration of the Zobrest case. For years, two titans of constitutional law—Catholic neoconservative William Bentley Ball and civil libertarian Leo Pfeffer—battled over what was legally permissible with regard to freedom of religion. Ultimately, the court enunciated a controversial Lemon Test to address this thorny area of its jurisprudence.