Editor’s Note: The latest edition of the Norwood News is out now, and its our annual Year in Review issue–a recap of the biggest stories that took place in 2011, in the Bronx and beyond. Over the next week or so, we’ll be rolling these top stories out here on Breaking Bronx. Enjoy, and a happy and healthy New Year to all of our readers!

The Bronx Household of Faith’s 17-year legal battle with the Department of Education came to a close in 2011 with the University Heights church and dozens of other religious groups facing eviction from school buildings throughout the five boroughs. The story thrust the small evangelical congregation into the national spotlight and struck up a debate that will move onto the legislative stage in 2012.

Thanks to support from local elected officials, including City Councilman Fernando Cabrera and State Assemblyman Neslon Castro, Bronx Household and its 48-member congregation may be able to continue holding worship services inside the PS/MS 15 auditorium on Andrews Avenue, as it has for the past decade. Castro introduced legislation that would change the state’s education law to allow churches to worship in public school buildings.

Before this past June, few had heard of Bronx Household of Faith, which has operated in University Heights since 1973, first in a backyard on Andrews Avenue and then in a group home for struggling men nearby on University Avenue. In 1994, the church applied to worship inside PS/MS 15 and was denied, touching off a legal battle that would go back and forth over the next 17 years.

They won the right to worship inside PS/MS 15 in 2002 when a court ordered an injunction of the DOE’s rule prohibiting worship inside schools. Other churches citywide promptly followed their lead.

In June, however, an appeals court ruled, 2-1, to uphold the DOE’s policy against worship services inside its buildings. Bronx Household and the Alliance appealed the ruling, which brought the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But after deliberating on the case for at least a week, the Supreme Court declined to review the case without comment on Dec. 5.

That move upheld the lower court ruling in favor of the DOE, which gave churches until Feb. 12 to find a new place to worship. Bronx Household leaders hope that will be enough time for state legislators to pass the bill, introduced by Castro, that would allow them to stay at PS/MS 15 indefinitely, or at least until they can complete construction on a new church in a building just across the street.