BANGOR (AP) – A seventh-grade social studies teacher in Presque Isle who said he was barred from teaching about non-Christian civilizations has sued his school district for allegedly violating his First Amendment right of free expression.

Gary Cole of Washburn, a teacher at Skyway Middle School, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court against School Administrative District 1.

Cole alleged that complaints by “a small group of fundamentalist Christian individuals” led to the creation of a curriculum “which never mentions religions other than Christianity and never teaches the history of civilizations other than Christian civilizations.”

“He can’t even teach the history of anti-Semitism (or the) history of ancient Greece,” Cole’s lawyer, A.J. Greif of Bangor, said Tuesday.

“How can you explain the evolution of democracy in the Western world without talking about ancient Greece? He can’t talk about all the influences of the Indian, Japanese or Chinese cultures.”

Superintendent Gehrig Johnson said Tuesday he had not seen the lawsuit but noted that the curriculum has been “developed by teachers across the district and adopted by the SAD 1 School Committee.”

“Teachers are expected to follow the curriculum,” he added.

Cole’s suit alleges that the curriculum infringes on “his students’ First Amendment rights to the free flow of information within the classroom” and that it “constitutes an illegal establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment.”

Greif said that when Cole has gone outside the prescribed curriculum he has been reprimanded and given warnings that he could lose his job.

The attorney said the district was imposing curricular choices upon the students that are framed by one particular religion in the community.

Cole had been teaching a broader curriculum at one point, but during the last several years members of a local church group “had been complaining and attempting to get the curriculum confined to a history of Christian civilization, not the civilization of the Eastern Hemisphere,” the lawyer said.

Greif said Cole wasn’t trying to teach anything unusual or anything that wasn’t being taught in most seventh grades across the state. His suit seeks injunctive relief to allow him to teach “the history of the entire Eastern Hemisphere, as appropriate.”

Patrick Phillips, deputy commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, declined to comment on the specifics of the case but said school boards set curriculum for a district and Maine’s Learning Results “allow districts some degree of flexibility.”

They “give local districts the latitude to make choices and decisions about the content of instruction and curriculum that meets local needs,” he said.

The state’s academic standards stipulate that history curriculum for grades five through eight include having pupils “identify the sequence of major events and people in the history of Maine, the United States, and selected world civilizations.”

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