TL;DR
Hillsborough County Public Schools sells banner space on school fences at published rates. $13,500 for all 27 high schools. $6,500 for ten. A Google Street View capture from December 2025 shows a Bay Chapel banner on the fence at Wharton High School advertising Sunday and Christmas Eve services.
I applied for the same space at the same price, as a Florida corporation, and asked the district to put any denial in writing with the provision cited.
Broward tried this in 2024. I got past their motion to dismiss pro se in Stevens v. School Board of Broward County, 24-61926-Civ-Scola, and the board voted 8-1 to pull every religious banner in the district rather than hang mine.
They can hang my banner or they can close the fence. Either one is the win. Ten business days.
In December 2025, a Google car with a camera on a stick drove down Tampa’s Bruce B. Downs Boulevard and photographed the fence at Wharton High School.
Dark blue vinyl. Gold lettering. A little nativity scene. CHRISTMAS AT BAY CHAPEL. Sundays 10:00 AM. Christmas Eve at 3:30 and 5:30. baychapel.com.
So Hillsborough County Public Schools is renting fence to a church that wants your ass in a pew by Christmas Eve, and somebody in New Tampa looked at that and thought, sure, fine, hang it.
Wonderful. I’ll take ten.
Nobody funds this. No foundation, no grant, no defense fund.
Filing fees and certified mail out of my own pocket.
The rate card
Hillsborough runs a sponsorship operation. Not a booster mom with a folding table and a Square reader. A district revenue line with a sponsorship manager, a glossy media kit, and published prices.
Field banners at all 27 high schools, $13,500 a year. Ten schools of your choice, $6,500. Elementary carline, $550 each. The Blake High School facade facing I-275 goes for twenty grand for ninety days against a claimed 6,225,000 cars a month.
Read how they sell it. Gain brand awareness. Reach your mass audience in one shot. Deliver your company’s message. Let our fans experience your brand on game day.
That is not a school thanking a partner. That is a billboard company with a mascot.
I asked Wharton’s published rate, with the artwork and the Street View photograph of the Bay Chapel banner attached. Then the question that does the work: if you will not display this, put it in writing, cite the provision you’re relying on, and tell me what change would make it acceptable.
Download Hillsborough County Public Schools Satanology Sponsorship Inquiry
Who’s asking
I have been running this test for three decades. I ended sectarian invocations at commission meetings in Coral Springs, Dania Beach, North Lauderdale, Deerfield Beach, and Delray Beach. I went at Brevard County in 2025 over church banners at five high schools and Fox News carried it. In New Britain, Connecticut, they LITERALLY JUST closed the public forum rather than fly my flag, which is a win with a ribbon on it.
FIRE devoted an episode of So to Speak to how this works.
I am not a fringe crank with a grudge. I am a fringe crank with a docket.
The messenger is the problem and that’s the point
The banner says MINISTRY OF CHAZ THE BROPOSTLE.
Underneath, THE CHURCH OF SATANOLOGY AND PERPETUAL SOIRÉE, which I named during what I can only describe as a productive evening. There’s a cartoon demon on it. He is pointing at you. He looks like he wants to sell you a timeshare.
At the bottom: SATAN LOVES THE FIRST AMENDMENT. Which is the single most legally accurate sentence on that entire piece of vinyl.
Here’s what happens when it lands in a general counsel’s inbox. Some poor bastard with a JD and a mortgage opens the attachment, sees a grinning devil in a Perpetual Soirée wordmark, and files it under crank. Then he scrolls down and finds a Florida corporate registration, a rate-tier selection, a Street View panorama ID, and a citation to a 2024 Eleventh Circuit opinion that torched a Hillsborough County agency’s advertising policy on its face.
He cannot decide which one he’s holding.
That indecision is the entire product. Institutions handle cranks one way and litigants another way, and when they can’t tell, they improvise. Improvisation goes in writing. Writing is the artifact.
This is not my first rodeo, though I did arrive in the clown’s car.
Nobody in Tampa gets to grade my paper
Every district tries the same move. They squint at the wordmark and start drafting a paragraph about whether this is a real religion.
Two problems with that.
The first is that the claim here doesn’t require anyone to care. This is a forum question. Hillsborough sells fence space at a published rate to buyers who pay it. If they’ll rent to Bay Chapel and won’t rent to me, the constitutional defect is in the renting, not in my soul. Shurtleff v. City of Boston settled the shape of this in 2022. Fly all the flags or take down the pole.
The second is that the Eleventh Circuit already looked at the definitional problem and came back empty-handed. In January 2024, Judge Kevin Newsom wrote a long concurrence trying to define religion and gave up in public. Belief in a deity knocks out Buddhists and Jains. A supernatural creator knocks out Deists and Unitarian Universalists. A sacred text knocks out Shinto. A hierarchical church knocks out Hindus. Ritual knocks out Quakers. Proselytizing knocks out Jews.
He asked, in a published federal opinion, whether Randian Objectivism qualifies. Whether Scientology does. Whether Transhumanism does. His answer was a shrug in a black robe.
Then he pointed at Thomas, Seeger, and Hernandez, where the Supreme Court told judges to stop: it is not within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants’ interpretations of those creeds.
A federal appellate judge wrote that Shinto has no official scripture while explaining why every definition of religion falls apart. That’s not my argument. That’s the circuit that governs Tampa.
Their own policy hands me the crowbar
I read Board Policy 9700.01. All of it. On a Tuesday. This is what I do instead of having hobbies.
The prohibited-content list runs A through O. Alcohol. Tobacco. Drugs. Drug paraphernalia. Weapons. Obscenity. Political candidates. Ballot issues. Libel. False and deceptive advertising.
Religion is not on it.
The word does not appear anywhere in the policy.
Not once.
Miami-Dade bought the same numbered policy from the same vendor and wrote in a sentence declaring the district does not intend to open its property as a forum for political, religious, or controversial expression. Broward’s Policy 6300 names religious organizations in the exclusion outright. Hillsborough has neither sentence. Somebody deleted it or never bought the version with it, and either way I would love to see the drafting file, which is a thing I typed with a preservation notice already sitting in their inbox.
What Hillsborough does have is Guideline N: inclusion of advertisements on district property does not constitute or imply approval and/or endorsement of any product, service, organization, or activity.
Read that twice.
In 2015 the Eleventh Circuit decided Mech v. School Board of Palm Beach County. I know David Mech, nice guy and really bright. Also, a math tutor who was also a retired porn star had banners on school fences. The district yanked them. He sued and lost on government speech, meaning the First Amendment never got in the door.
Why government speech? The banners carried school initials. They ran in school colors. They called the sponsor a partner. They existed to say thank you. Palm Beach charged $650.
Hillsborough charges $13,500, prints your logo, sells you brand awareness, invites your fans to experience your brand on game day, and then disclaims endorsement in its own policy manual.
Hillsborough can still reach for Mech. Everybody does. But a district that prices its fence by traffic count, sells the buyer’s message rather than its own gratitude, and writes a non-endorsement clause into its policy is standing on considerably worse ground than Palm Beach was.
They were warned. In this county. Twenty-three months ago.
January 10, 2024. Young Israel of Tampa v. Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority.
HART had a rule against ads that primarily promote a religious faith or organization. An Orthodox synagogue submitted an ad for Chanukah on Ice. HART said no, then generously offered to run it if the synagogue removed the menorah, and also the word menorah. A HART employee later testified that if they’d known more about Judaism they’d have asked them to lose the dreidel too.
The Eleventh Circuit struck the policy down on its face. It ducked the viewpoint question and killed the thing on narrower ground: the policy failed to define its own terms, provided no guidance or training, and handed the call to whoever happened to be at the desk that morning.
The opinion is a farce with citations. HART ran ads for St. Leo University, a Catholic institution founded in 1889 by Benedictines, but killed St. Joseph’s Hospital for having Franciscan Sisters in its founding story. One reviewer testified she’d flag a Bible ad and wave through a Book of Mormon ad because she didn’t know what the Book of Mormon was. The court noted in a footnote that The Book of Mormon is also a Broadway musical and wondered aloud what HART would have done with that.
HART’s policy and Hillsborough’s are not twins. HART banned religious ads by name. Hillsborough bans nothing of the kind and instead reserves unlimited discretion in general terms.
Same defect, different clothes. Guideline B: case-by-case basis. Guideline I: may be rejected if determined to be inappropriate. Guideline O: final discretion with the Board. No definitions. No training. No guidance documents. Standardless discretion administered by whoever opens the envelope, which is precisely what the Eleventh Circuit told a Hillsborough County agency it could not do.
Twenty-three months later, a church was advertising Christmas Eve service times on a Hillsborough County school fence.
Broward already ran this play
October 2023. I asked to hang banners at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and West Glades Middle School. Broward said no.
Between December 2023 and September 2024, Broward let Calvary Chapel and Potter’s House hang banners at West Glades Middle and Coral Springs High. The Pentecostals of Cooper City had one at Cooper City High. Their pastor went to the podium at a board meeting to complain when it came down, which is a level of self-awareness I still think about.
I sued. Stevens v. School Board of Broward County, No. 24-61926-Civ-Scola, S.D. Fla., filed October 16, 2024.
In January 2025 Judge Robert Scola granted in part and denied in part the board’s motion to dismiss. My First Amendment claim survived. My Florida Religious Freedom Restoration Act claim survived. The § 871.04 claim did not. Trial was set for March 10, 2025.
A pro se plaintiff with a cartoon devil got past a school board’s outside counsel on a motion to dismiss in the Southern District of Florida, and Eugene Volokh wrote about it.
Then Broward did what Broward was always going to do. In December 2024 the board voted 8-1 to ban religious and political signage across the district. Every church banner in Broward County came off the fence. And when there was nothing left to fight over, the case went away.
Understand what happened there. I got the outcome and lost the vehicle. The banners came down. They stayed down. I was after the fence, and I got the fence.
Calling my shot
Hillsborough runs the Broward play. Book it.
They will not hang my banner. They will quietly take Bay Chapel’s down, tell a judge there’s no live controversy, and jog off the field with the ball tucked under one arm like they meant to do that.
Good. Run it. The fence closes and every church in Tampa loses the space, and they lose it because a school district with a legal department could not draft one sentence that let a nativity scene in and kept a cartoon devil out.
If they close it in September and reopen it next August when the football schedule drops, I’ll be standing on Bruce B. Downs with a camera and a Chapter 119 request, because I have the attention span of a golden retriever about exactly one thing and this is it.
And if they deny me while Bay Chapel keeps selling Christmas Eve on public property, then we’re going to have a much longer conversation in a federal courthouse, where I have been before, uninvited, and where I have already beaten a school board once.
Ten business days.
My partner is a nurse. Her clinical assessment is that the district should expect a bathroom emergency coming their way.
All hail Satan.
Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.
