ST. LOUIS (AP):

A rural school district's long-standing practice of allowing the distribution of Bibles to grade school students is unconstitutional, a federal judge has ruled.

An attorney for the southeastern Missouri School District said yesterday he will appeal the judge's injunction against the practice.

For more than three decades, the South Iron School District in Annapolis, 120 miles (193 kilometres) southwest of St. Louis in the heart of the Bible Belt, allowed representatives of Gideons International to give away Bibles in fifth-grade classrooms.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit two years ago on behalf of four sets of parents. In August, a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a temporary injunction against the practice.