When her son’s private school closed this past fall, Liana Rodriguez said finding a new school was difficult.
It was a last-minute decision she had to make, but she ultimately opted to enroll him at West Aurora School District 129. Still, 36-year-old Rodriguez had some hesitation about sending her son, Miliano, to public school. The 7-year-old had previously attended Covenant Christian School in Aurora.
“He has such … a faith-based background,” Rodriguez said. “I didn’t want him to lose it.”
But then she learned about a program for West Aurora students called LifeWise Academy, which teaches the Bible to public school students off-campus during lunch and recess.
“It kind of just worked out in our favor,” Rodriguez recalled.
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The LifeWise program that serves West Aurora students – the program is not sponsored or operated by the school district – is just one of numerous such programs in Illinois, and nationwide.
LifeWise is an Ohio-based nonprofit organization that provides off-campus religious lessons to public school students during the school day that’s generated both support and skepticism in its home state and neighboring ones and raised questions about the role of religion in public schools.
The organization touts the program as offering “an opportunity for character formation and faith-based instruction without disrupting the academic day,” according to a statement provided to The Beacon-News from the public relations firm that represents LifeWise.
Of all of Illinois’ more than 800 public school districts, LifeWise operates in 15 across the state, per the organization. It is expecting to operate in more than 1,100 schools nationwide as of the 2025-26 school year, nearly double the amount it operated in the previous year.
The LifeWise program for West Aurora students launched in January 2025.
West Aurora Associate Superintendent of Operations Angie Smith said the LifeWise program started at Freeman and Greenman elementary schools, when the organization approached the district about starting the program.
This school year, LifeWise expanded to three more West Aurora schools — two elementary schools, McCleery and Hall, as well as Washington Middle — and currently has over 70 district students — of its almost 11,000 in total — in the program, according to Smith and Marti Neahring, the district’s executive director of student and family services.
At West Aurora, parents fill out a permission slip, which indicates that the program “is not sponsored, operated or supervised by the local school district,” according to records obtained by The Beacon-News. A checkbox notes that a child who participates “will not be under the care, control or supervision of District 129 when they are released … to travel to LifeWise Academy class and during their participation in the LifeWise Academy class, until their return to the elementary school.”
Smith said the program has not been disruptive because the organization has been “respectful of the boundaries that we set in terms of making sure that this wasn’t something that we were going to market.”
She said that the program is “essentially a parental right,” in that parents are allowed to take their children out of school for religious education purposes. She emphasized that the process would be the same for any other organization trying to start a similar program, and that parents are able to sign their children out of school for other religious purposes if they choose.
But if this was something parents were interested in, Smith told The Beacon-News, the concern was with ensuring that “the in and the out are as seamless as possible, so that (the students) can jump right back into instruction.”
The process for starting a local LifeWise includes steps like gathering signatures from the community, forming a steering committee, requesting the local school district’s approval and ultimately recruiting and training a local team to facilitate it, according to the organization’s website.
But the national organization is “an incredible support” in terms of handling things like insurance and devising the curriculum, according to Christie Hart, LifeWise coordinator for the program for West Aurora students.
Hart described her rationale for starting up a local LifeWise program as coming from her own experience seeing behavioral issues as a substitute teacher.
“Subbing … all the time and seeing wonderful, wonderful educators pouring themselves out to their students … the job is very intensive,” Hart, who has put several of her own children through the district, said. “And seeing so much with the students … bullying and disrespect, you know, just for the teachers, it was really disheartening.”
Hart first heard about LifeWise via a brochure from her father, she recalled, and eventually began looking into it, forming a committee with some other members of the community and working with the school district to ensure it offered the program during a non-instructional time.
The lessons are held once a week during lunch and recess, Hart explained. Volunteers from LifeWise pick the students up from school and take them to a local church or library to hold the lesson, West Aurora officials said, then bring them back into the school at the conclusion of the lesson. The organization also has a red bus branded with LifeWise’s name that it uses to transport students.
The lessons themselves have three components, Hart explained: head, heart and hands. The “head” is the teaching of a story from the Bible, the “heart” is about “how Jesus also fits into that story,” Hart said, and the “hands” is the portion devoted to character development.
A sample curriculum from LifeWise says the organization’s curriculum is “designed to take students through the entire Bible, beginning in Genesis and ending in Revelation.”
Students eat lunch during the lesson, Hart said, and play a game or an activity to help them “blow off steam and run and play” in lieu of going to recess.
Lessons for West Aurora students last for 20 minutes, a schedule obtained by The Beacon-News shows, not including the time it takes to travel to and from the school.
LifeWise points to a 1952 Supreme Court ruling, Zorach v. Clauson, as allowing for a program like theirs to operate, so long as it is privately funded, secures written parental consent and instruction takes place off of school property, the PR firm representing LifeWise said in an email.
Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, explained that the court case ruled that the Constitution permits release time for religious instruction as “just an accommodation of religion.” That makes a program like LifeWise permissible, though he noted that that “doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea.”
Questioning the operations of the program, Koppelman suggested that the “only reason” for holding the lessons during the school day is “because it lets you generate pressure on the students to participate in the religious program.”
Even earlier, in 1948, the Supreme Court struck down religious education classes during school hours in Champaign, Illinois, public schools, saying that the program violated separation of church and state.
Under state statute, however, Illinois students can be exempted from attending their public school for “religious reasons, including the observance of a religious holiday or participation in religious instruction, or because the tenets of his religion forbid secular activity on a particular day or days or at a particular time of day.”
A school board may require that the student’s parent or guardian give notice of the child’s absence to the school principal or other school personnel, per state statute. A district’s superintendent is to “develop and distribute to schools” the appropriate procedures for these kinds of absences and how schools are to be notified of a student’s impending absence.
As for why LifeWise opts to offer instruction during school hours — rather than after school, or on weekends, for example — the organization said, via its PR firm, that the program “brings religious instruction right into their child’s school day.”
“Families are busy, often juggling work and extracurricular activities for multiple children,” the organization said via its PR firm. “Further, many parents want Bible lessons during school hours because kids benefit from the character lessons, which encourage good behavior throughout the day.”
Echoing a similar sentiment, Hart pointed to the fact that the program is optional, giving parents “the freedom to choose an option that best suits their family’s needs.”
But a program like LifeWise is distinct from the sort of release time programs for religious instruction that predated it, according to Richard Layton, an associate professor in the department of religion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who’s written about the teaching of religion in public schools. Those programs, which started up in the 1950s, were more so agreements between local school districts and local organizations from a variety of different religious traditions.
“(LifeWise) presents as being a kind of locally-based, parent-driven operation, but it’s part of a very large network of corporate representatives who are shaping and directing the show,” Layton said. “I think, you know, what that means, then, is that they are trying to develop a nationalized Christian education.”
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, LifeWise’s total revenue was over $39 million in 2025, up from around $35 million in 2024 and just under $14 million the prior year, the organization’s tax records show
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. It was founded and is led by Joel Penton, a former Ohio State University football player.The organization has said it’s on track to teach nearly 100,000 students in 34 states during the 2025-26 school year.
Efforts to bring the Bible to public schools aren’t new, however. Layton pointed to previous efforts by organizations like the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and the Bible Literacy Project to present the Bible in a “religiously neutral” way in public schools.
“It (LifeWise) strikes me as an innovation upon some previous Bible education programs in public schools,” Layton said.
But LifeWise operates differently, he said, by explicitly offering a religious message — just not in the public schools themselves.
Layton’s previous work has offered some support for public schools to undertake a world religion curriculum that introduces students to different traditions, which may include character-based or ethical components. But LifeWise, he suggested, is “explicitly trying to have a religious learning outcome, leading to an identity that is conforming to their particular brand of Christianity, and one that is less oriented towards understanding of others and their particular identities.”
Though LifeWise has on its website a detailed “Statement of Faith,” that “isn’t necessarily what parents are going to care about,” according to Layton, who hypothesized that parents may be more interested in, for example, developing a sense of “traditional values” in their children.
“I can imagine that, in West Aurora, a number of parents might say, it really is good for our kids to, whether or not they’re members of a church, to have some kind of education in terms of basic values,” Layton said. “And that this curriculum is filling that gap in the public school curriculum.”
The organization has garnered some opposition, however, from groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Respect Public Schools and the Secular Education Association.
The Secular Education Association, for example, tracks release time religious instruction programs like LifeWise, and is “closely watching how LifeWise programs are introduced and implemented at the local level” in Illinois, the group’s executive director Molly Gaines said in an email to The Beacon-News.
“Our concerns with LifeWise specifically are rooted in how these programs function during the compulsory school day and the real-world impacts they have on students and districts,” Gaines said. “These include instructional time loss, social and peer pressure on students, inequitable treatment of non-participating students, transportation and supervision concerns, and the ways public schools become operationally entangled with private religious organizations.”
LifeWise, for its part, has emphasized that the program is voluntary, but said that “much of the criticism” of LifeWise is “due to a misunderstanding of how released-time programs function.”
But, despite its opponents, the program is continuing to experience “significant growth,” LifeWise said via its PR firm, citing a “real hunger for a program that benefits kids academically, mentally and spiritually.”
That expansion includes districts in Illinois, like DuPage 200 in Wheaton, per LifeWise’s website.
Nearby East Aurora School District 131 may be getting a program soon. Communications obtained by The Beacon-News indicate that the district is in the early stages of meeting with LifeWise about the program potentially starting in District 131 in the future. The district has met with the team from LifeWise, Superintendent Bob Halverson has confirmed, and is determining next steps.
Hart said she’s received positive feedback on the West Aurora program in terms of student behavior. Neahring said there’s probably not enough district students in LifeWise to determine whether it’s had an effect.
For Rodriguez, whose son started at West Aurora — and LifeWise — this school year, LifeWise has enabled her son to pursue his religious beliefs even when he’s no longer learning it at his school — in part due to LifeWise, she thinks.
“Every Thursday that he has LifeWise,” Rodriguez said, “he comes home and is so excited about it.”
Juliana Halley, 36, of Aurora, spoke similarly of the program. Two of her four children — a second-grader and a fifth-grader — have participated in LifeWise at West Aurora since the program started.
Halley heard about the program early on from Hart, with whom she attends church. She’s also gotten involved as a volunteer, making copies and helping with new student registration.
She said LifeWise has made some families get more involved in the local churches, as the program has given students some connection to them. She also touted the small classes as benefiting students by giving them some additional attention.
And it’s inspired her daughter, who’s in second grade, to invite her friends to join LifeWise.
“It’s given her a boldness that it’s OK to talk about Jesus,” Halley said.
Halley sees that as the potential LifeWise has in West Aurora and beyond.
“You can’t change everybody,” Halley said, “but if you could impact a few kids or a few people, even, I mean, that can make a difference.”