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Roger A. DeHart calls himself a science teacher, nothing more and nothing less.

DeHart's critics call him a creationist who for 12 years has cleverly used euphemisms and pseudoscience to illegally push the biblical version of human origins on his public high-school biology classes in northwest Washington state.

Either way, he has emerged as part of the cutting edge in a rekindled national brawl over evolution's place in the schools reminiscent of John Scopes' 1925 trial for teaching Charles Darwin's theory in a Tennessee classroom.

DeHart and his supporters say he's just presenting an even-handed look at a legitimate scientific controversy-without using religion-to his 9th- and 10th- grade students at Burlington-Edison High School, 65 miles north of Seattle. Others in the 3,500-student school district say he quietly peddles a "don't ask, don't tell" brand of creationism that went undetected by school officials for a decade, until a student complained two years ago.

Most constitutional scholars thought the U.S. Supreme Court had ended the evolution debate once and for all in 1987 when it struck down on First Amendment grounds a Louisiana law that required equal time for creation science in schools where evolution was taught. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578.

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But a new species of creationists is trying to fly under the First Amendment's radar by eliminating references to God and the Bible, and instead trying to discredit Darwin, often through a scientific-sounding notion called intelligent design. Unlike Darwinism, which neither denies nor presupposes God's existence, intelligent design assumes the world is too complex to be anything but the plan of an intelligent agent.
"Mostly because of the baggage of creationism, it's intelligent design-you're not concluding who the designer is, you're just seeing evidence of the design," explains DeHart, who taught intelligent design until he was ordered last school year to quit using the term. "I try to discourage students from bringing in the Bible and God, which is something I never do."

Nevertheless, with the school board's acquiescence and despite threats of a lawsuit, DeHart says he plans to continue trying to poke holes in Darwinian evolution when the four classes he teaches reach that unit near the end of the current school year.

Although administrators have made DeHart water down his presentation, opponents say the religious message remains unmistakable. School officials allowed a new stand-in for God into DeHart's classroom: irreducible complexities, a key part of the intelligent design theme that argues living things are too intricate to have evolved according to Darwin's theory of natural selection.

"Same beast," says Julya Hampton, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. "Different color, but same beast."
DeHart says he doesn't take sides in class. "My students will tell you I present it right down the middle of the line," says DeHart, a devout Baptist who acknowledges his personal belief in creation. "Until all this broke, they wouldn't know what side of the line I was on. The important thing is how you present it in the classroom."

To hear Garann R. Means tell it, someone else must have been teaching biology when she took the course seven years ago. Means, 20, now a college junior, remembers a debate over evolution DeHart orchestrated as a class exercise, but which turned out more like a segment from the Jerry Springer Show.

"He was making fun of me and goading the class into laughing at me," Means says. "He was like a comedian in a nightclub. It wasn't about debate. It wasn't about science. It was about proselytizing on DeHart's part."

'They're Back'

DeHart has company. In the wake of the Kansas Board of Education's highly publicized decision in August to drop evolution from state assessment tests, school officials in that state's rural south central Pratt County were listening to proposals to adopt intelligent design as a supplement to Darwin's theory.

Proponents also were urging adoption of a textbook that champions intelligent design. Titled Of Pandas and People, the book is marketed by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a suburban Dallas group that focuses on Christian-based areas of academic concern.
DeHart uses excerpts from the book, which the mainstream scientific community has roundly condemned as religion disguised in a white lab coat.

"I think evolutionary theory looks at the glass as being half-full, and Pandas looks at the glass as being half-empty," DeHart says. "So I thought there was a balance."

In Faribault, Minn., about 50 miles south of Minneapolis, high school teacher Rodney LeVake is suing administrators on freedom of religion and speech grounds after they reassigned him for skipping the section on evolution in the state- approved biology text.

Back in Louisiana, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans in August declared unconstitutional a disclaimer one school district required in biology classes before teachers began units on evolution. Instructors had to tell students that the "scientific theory of evolution" is "not intended to influence or dissuade the biblical version of creation or any other concept." Freiler v. Tangipahoa Parish Bd. of Educ., Nos. 97-30879, 98-3012.

"It's amazing how these cases have proliferated," says Florida State University constitutional law professor Steven M. Gey, a church-state separatist who frequently writes on religious issues. "After Edwards was decided, these folks didn't say 'boo' for about five years. Now in the last two or three years, they're back. All of a sudden it's 1925 again."

No one said "boo," or anything else for that matter, for a long time at Burlington-Edison High, situated in Washington's Skagit County, a valley stretching from the snow-capped North Cascade Range on the east to the icy blue waters of Puget Sound on the west.

The community lies just beyond the urban congestion of Seattle, where the snarled freeway traffic alone suggests an argument against intelligent design. at Skagit's heart along Interstate 5 sit the adjacent cities of Burlington and Mount Vernon, small towns that sport a suburban strip-mall look as new businesses pop up along the highway.

Skagit County has grown dramatically in recent years, with a 25 percent population increase from 79,545 in 1990 to an estimated 100,600 in 1999.
Over time, the traditional economic base of farming, fishing and logging has yielded to a combination of jobs in the service industry, tourism, government, manufacturing and retail sales. Major expansions by Microsoft and Boeing in neighboring communities also have meant an influx of new residents for Skagit.

Despite some increases in minority populations-especially former migrant farm workers from Mexico-the county remains 90 percent white. The local Yellow Pages list 130 churches-nearly all Protestant-and one Jewish community center.

Just Plain Folks

Despite the growth, the community retains a small-town flavor. Angled street parking in Burlington's old central business district still lets drivers pull straight in and get out of their cars for a haircut or a bite to eat. Business appears steady at the feed store outside town on state Route 20.

Burlington residents say the area remains intimate enough that everyone knows everyone else's business. It's also a community that likes to avoid controversy, especially in the debate over DeHart's biology class. School superintendent Richard O. Jones refused to allow an ABA Journal reporter onto school property to interview students and other teachers.

"I'm working hard to diminish this issue," Jones says. "My purpose is to protect the classroom and learning environment."

School board president Oscar Lagerlund says most of the community wishes the issue would just go away. But he knows it won't.

"As long as there're ducks flying, someone's going to be shooting at them," Lagerlund says. It's just impossible to sweep away controversy with subjects as touchy as God and evolution.

"It's a really private thing," says 18-year-old senior Eric Bott, a DeHart supporter who took the course in 1996-97. "People don't want to see their belief systems taken apart."

The professorial-looking DeHart arrived at Burlington-Edison in 1987 after a teaching stint at a Christian school in Chattanooga, Tenn.

"It was a sort of homecoming," says DeHart, who grew up in Seattle and received a bachelor's degree in science from Seattle Pacific University, which bills itself as a "Christian university for the 21st century."

The Supreme Court scarcely had plunged a stake through the heart of creation science when DeHart began teaching intelligent design in the 1987-88 school year.

A tiny minority of scientists, joined by philosophers, theologians and others uncomfortable with the suggestion that life on Earth could have arisen by chance began concocting intelligent design in the 1980s.

Stripped to its bare bones, the belief asserts that because no one was around to witness evolution as it occurred, intelligent design is just as plausible.

Advocates insist they're serious scientists who take the same data used by Darwinian evolutionists and interpret it differently. They justify intelligent design as suitable for public schools by seizing in part on a passage from the seven-member majority opinion in Edwards, in which Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote schools could teach "a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind" if they don't have a religious theme.

Despite its extensive use of technical language and an absence of religious terms, mainstream scientists vilify intelligent design for setting up imagined problem areas in accepted evolutionary theory as straw men, then knocking them down. "Even without all the religious inferences, you just have bad science," says physical anthropologist Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Berkeley, Calif.

The courts never have directly confronted intelligent design as an issue. But U.S. District Judge Marcel Livaudais Jr. of New Orleans stated that intelligent design is the same thing as already-outlawed creation science when he struck the Louisiana disclaimer also axed later by the 5th Circuit in August. No. 94-3577 (E.D.La. 1997).

It's Alive!

Intelligent design came to life in DeHart's classroom in late spring 1988 and remained in good health for 10 years.

The two-week unit combined Darwinian evolution, from the school-issued text, with 15 to 20 pages of photocopied excerpts from Of Pandas and People and other sources promoting intelligent design. Former students say they had to return the copies at the end of the unit.

A few years later, DeHart began showing the film Inherit the Wind, the classic dramatization of the courtroom confrontation between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. The lesson culminated with students either participating in a classroom debate or writing a short paper weighing the pros and cons of each side. The debaters got to choose their positions.

"Actually, there were a couple of occasions when it really got hot," DeHart recalls. "Afterward, they were emotionally wrung out."
He estimates that 70 percent of the students were open to intelligent design by the end of the unit. The sailing was smooth for DeHart, whom students on both sides of the controversy describe as a popular, easygoing teacher who sometimes breaks up the classroom tedium with stories about his summer experiences as a smoke jumper for the U.S. Forest Service in eastern Washington.

The joy ride became bumpy in the summer of 1997, when one student bothered by the class told her father about it. He took the matter to ACLU officials in Seattle, who declined to identify the family.

"[The father] was concerned about retaliation against his daughter, so he wanted us to look into this quietly," explains ACLU public education director Douglas Honig. The ACLU began trying to get information from then- superintendent Paul Chaplik.

"He didn't respond to us," Honig says. "Basically, he thought he could ignore us."

But Chaplik did get hold of DeHart, who by that time had left for his summer smoke jumper's job. After talking with DeHart and some students, Chaplik concluded nothing was wrong.

That didn't fly with ACLU officials. They went public in the spring of 1998 by reporting their suspicions to the local Skagit Valley Herald. "We were at the point where we wanted it to break, because we weren't getting any response from the school district," Honig says.

Center of Attention

Then the school board wanted an explanation. DeHart was summoned to appear at the last board meeting of the year. He came accompanied by local lawyer Richard M. Sybrandy, whom he found after contacting the Rutherford Institute, the same folks who nearly toppled President Clinton by breathing life into the legally lame but politically potent Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

Like other school boards in small districts, Burlington-Edison board members deferred to the administration and took no action. For a while, it looked like it would be business as usual in DeHart's classroom in the coming school year.

That didn't last long. Chaplik retired during the summer and was replaced by Jones, who declared creationism off limits. DeHart was to stop using Pandas and stick to the standard text.

DeHart took his case to the school's curriculum committee, again accompanied by his lawyer. "They rejected the materials," DeHart says. "Their basis was that they seemed to overshadow the curriculum and gave the impression that evolution was false."

School board attorney Clifford D. Foster Jr., who came on the job with Jones, says some of the materials were also inappropriate because they contained personal attacks alleging fraud by historic figures in the development of modern evolutionary theory. Foster adds that in 20 years of representing school boards he had never seen a teacher come to a curriculum committee meeting with a lawyer in tow.

DeHart was down but not quite out. Principal Beth C. Vander Veen heard his appeal and eventually allowed him to use four pages from Pandas. A subchapter heading, "Intelligent Design: Package Deal," had been blocked out in the copy submitted to Vander Veen, and a paragraph referring to an intelligent agent had been lopped off. The debate and Inherit the Wind fell by the wayside.

Although Vander Veen expressly forbade DeHart from using intelligent design or other potential  problem terms, she did allow him to talk about the concept of irreducible complexities, which critics assail as just another surrogate for creationism.

Foster says he is satisfied that DeHart's presentation has been wiped clean of religious overtones and that it would pass constitutional muster.
But the compromise and the school board's failure to take definitive action steamed parents on both sides of the issue. Groups opposing and supporting DeHart have sprung up in recent months.

"There's a campaign to disrupt the teaching of science in public schools," says Syd Stapleton, a tool-and-die designer and a spokesman for the anti-DeHart faction. "DeHart is denying he's a part of this movement, but he's lying about it."

The other side does not mince words, either. It wants intelligent design back in class-no ifs, ands or buts.

"You should be able to follow the facts wherever they lead, and that's all I want-true science," says physician Paul C. Creelman, a family practitioner and perhaps DeHart's most vocal supporter.

"We're headed back there. I don't know how we're going to get there, but we're headed back."

Meanwhile, the ACLU is watching the situation and trying to determine whether to go to court.

Joe Cool

ACLU officials are tight-lipped about their plans. They recognize DeHart as a sophisticated, cool customer who could be tough to crack on the witness stand.

Any legal challenge would come under the First Amendment's establishment clause. A potential plaintiff in all likelihood would have to prove either of the first two prongs of the Supreme Court's three-part test for establishment clause violations laid down in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)

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The Lemon test would require a plaintiff to show either no secular purpose behind DeHart's teaching or that intelligent design has the effect of advancing one religion over another, or of religion over nonreligion.

The secular purpose prong could be tricky, given DeHart's denial of religious motivation. Other successful establishment clause challenges often have contained clear statements by government officials of their intentions to put God back in the classroom.

"It's very hard to litigate bad science," says Steven K. Green, general counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C. "You can't sue a bad science teacher under the establishment clause. You'd have to show he's almost entirely motivated by religion."

Still, some authorities DeHart cites for support don't try to hide the ball.

One is the Discovery Institute, a fledgling conservative think tank based in Seattle, whose officials make no secret of their goal to send Darwin to the showers and put God back in the game. In 1996, Discovery started the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to step in and fund academics who want to do intelligent design research but can't get money from traditional sources.

The center currently supports about 30 fellows and associates, says director Jay W. Richards. He acknowledges that religious connotations are unavoidable.

"An argument for design has theological implications as does an argument against design," Richards says. "Anybody who supports creationism is going to like a design argument."

DeHart has consulted with Discovery fellow David K. DeWolf, a Gonzaga University law professor. DeWolf published a paper this summer titled "Teaching the Origins Controversy: A Guide for the Perplexed."

In the paper, DeWolf outlines the constitutional background of the evolution debate and offers tips for those wanting to get around the Supreme Court. He counsels against the obvious faux pas, such as directly citing creationism or beliefs held by some that the Earth is *55 only 6,000 years old.

"We have to treat such views respectfully, but they can't form the basis of our curriculum-not because they are not true, but because the courts have made it clear that we may not," writes DeWolf, who teaches torts and contracts.

A challenge under Lemon's effect prong could target DeHart more directly, if the community reacts to the sanitized version of the course like it did to the old one.

Garann Means' younger sister, Gillian, a 17-year-old senior, remembers that only one other student signed up with her to take the side of evolution against intelligent design when her class debated the question in spring 1997.

"They ended up convincing the other kid I was debating with that both could have happened," says Gillian Means. "The rest of the class kind of gave up on me."

Even students who support DeHart recognize the implicit religious element and say school officials should stop beating around the bush.
"If they're going to let him teach it, let him teach it right," says Bott.

Glenda Merwine, an elementary school principal in nearby Oak Harbor, says the damage already has been done in her family. She says her 17-year-old son, Josh, came away from DeHart's class convinced that intelligent design is the way. Merwine says her son won't listen to her or her husband, Charles, a math teacher at Burlington-Edison.

"He says we don't know the truth," Merwine says. "It's a very sore spot in our house. I can't tell you how many nights of sleep we've lost over it."

Of the scores of letters school officials have received on the subject, an overwhelming majority of them support DeHart. But several letters suggest that the writers also see no distinction between intelligent design and creationism.

One letter from a United Methodist minister complained about how DeHart conducted the classroom debate. The Rev. Randy L. Quinn wrote that students for years had asked him how to prepare for the exercise. Then, Quinn said, he learned it wasn't a debate at all.

"It was an opportunity for people to get up on their soapboxes with little or no learning taking place," Quinn wrote. "Mr. DeHart's style promoted and fueled arguments, and that rarely produces light and education. In a true debate, students learn to argue both positions, not just their own."

Back Door Man

As they mull their options, ACLU officials appear bemused at the Burlington- Edison school board's reaction to DeHart. They say school boards in Washington typically have cut and run in the face of expensive and risky litigation when religious issues have come up in the past.
And while they haven't run across them, ACLU officials and other church-state separatists are convinced there are more teachers like DeHart out there, probably in small school districts where people are reluctant to speak up.

"I don't think he has anything to worry about from a legal perspective," says DeHart's lawyer Sybrandy. "It's a political issue now."

Maybe so, say ACLU officials. They wonder how long the diluted version of creationism forced on DeHart will satisfy hard-core advocates who want God front and center in school, stripped of intelligent design's semantic mask.

And they question whether DeHart and other back door creationists really lie on the leading edge when the courts have so clearly locked and bolted the front door.

"I sort of like the metaphor of painting him into a corner, rather than him advancing," says ACLU staff attorney Aaron H. Caplan.

But when told of declarations by some DeHart supporters that the ACLU wouldn't dare take on a case that's a sure-fire loser, officials there just smile and say nothing.

All the folks in Skagit County can do is sit back and wait to see who makes a monkey out of whom.

John Gibeaut is a reporter for the ABA Journal. His e-mail address is gibeautj@staff.abanet.org