2006), was a United States court case in Cobb County, Georgia involving a sticker placed in public school biology textbooks.

In 1997 a school policy adopted in Louisiana requiring the reading of a prepared statement before any teaching of evolution was also judged as unconstitutional (Freiler v. Tangipahoa).

Beginning in 1976 the Cobb County School District had policies in place requiring that their instructional program consider and accommodate for religious objections held by many of its residents to the science of human evolution.

In an attempt to defuse this protest, the decision was made to attach a sticker containing a statement written by the school district's legal counsel to each new textbook.

Thursday, March 28, 2002[1]The school board also adopted policy changes emphasizing its aim to "foster critical thinking among the students, to allow academic freedom consistent with legal requirements, to promote tolerance and acceptance of diversity of opinion, and to ensure a posture of neutrality to religion."

The textbook and policy changes had become a public event, but despite engendering much input from parents and other concerned citizens in the community, no attempt was made to solicit expert scientific opinion in coming to a decision.

Following adoption of the sticker, organizations, churches, academics and others from around the country contacted school officials congratulating them for opening the classroom to "the teaching and discussion of creationism and intelligent design".

[4] Parent Jeffrey Selman brought action against the school district for imposing the sticker on August 21, 2002, before any revisions to the 1995 policy were adopted.

He became a school teacher in the South Bronx, then later a COBOL programmer and traveled until he met his wife in Atlanta and finally settled in Cobb County where he resides as of 2015.

"[8] In the trial held to determine whether the sticker applied to the science textbooks was unconstitutional, the court examined the facts of the case against the three-prong test set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman.

Under the Lemon test, as it is commonly referred, a government-sponsored message violates the Establishment Clause if it fails any of the following: In the resulting court decision the judge found that the action taken in Cobb County School District met the legal standard established in the first prong:[4] the court found that the School Board sought to advance two secular purposes... ...to encourage students to engage in critical thinking... [and] ...to reduce offense to those students and parents whose personal beliefs might conflict with teaching on evolution.The judge merged the second and third prongs of the Lemon test to judge the actions taken by the school district under a single "effect" prong, and here judged those actions as failing to meet the standard set:[4] [T]he effects prong asks whether the statement at issue in fact conveys a message of endorsement or disapproval of religion to an informed, reasonable observer...In this case, the Court believes that an informed, reasonable observer would interpret the Sticker to convey a message of endorsement of religion.

This is particularly so in a case such as this one involving impressionable public school students who are likely to view the message on the Sticker as a union of church and state.In support of this conclusion, the judge writes: The critical language ... is the statement that "[e]volution is a theory, not a fact, concerning the origin of living things."

The plaintiffs utilized the same attorneys, Eric Rothschild and Richard Katskee of Pepper Hamilton, who had prevailed in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005.

[13] The Discovery Institute issued an official opinion that an "incompetent defense by Cobb County attorney may have caused [the] school district loss.