FRESNO, Calif. — Under legal pressure, a rural school district yesterday canceled an elective philosophy course on intelligent design and agreed never to promote the topic in class again.

A group of parents had sued the El Tejon Unified School District last week, accusing it of violating the constitutional separation of church and state by including intelligent design — the theory that living things are so complex they must have been designed by a higher being — in a philosophy course taught by a special-education teacher who is also a minister’s wife.

The district agreed to halt "Philosophy of Design" at Frazier Mountain High next week and said it would never again offer a "course that promotes or endorses creationism, creation science or intelligent design."

"This sends a strong signal to school districts across the country that they cannot promote creationism or intelligent design as an alternative to evolution whether they do so in a science class or a humanities class," said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which filed the suit on behalf of 11 parents.

Last month, Americans United participated in a lawsuit that blocked the Dover, Pa., school system from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that school board members’ true motive in approving the intelligent-design policy was to promote religion.

However, some activists contended that Jones' ruling opened the door to teaching intelligent design in philosophy or religion classes.

Superintendent John Wight defended the concept of the class but said concern about expensive litigation was one of the reasons the cash-strapped district settled.

"The idea was to have an open discussion of the different points of view on the origin of life, a philosophical exercise in critical thinking," he said. "However, we are a small school district with limited financial resources."

The El Tejon settlement was announced just before a U.S. District Court judge was scheduled to hold a hearing on whether to halt the class midway through the monthlong winter term at the 500-student school in Lebec, about 70 miles north of Los Angeles.

District officials were encouraged to settle by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that supports intelligent design, which had filed a court brief in favor of the Dover school board.

"It was misconceived," said John West, a senior fellow at the institute. "It was almost all about Biblical creationism, not intelligent design, and it also seemed lopsided."

The course relied almost exclusively on videos that presented religious theories as scientific ones, including titles such as "Chemicals to Living Cells: Fantasy or Science?" and "Astronomy and the Bible," according to the suit.

In the weeks after the class came to light, the topic was debated in the hamlets that sit atop the mountains dividing the left-leaning Los Angeles basin from the conservative San Joaquin Valley.

Demonstrators rallied outside a board meeting Jan. 13 in opposition of the class. The weekly newspaper, the Mountain Enterprise, devoted five pages to letters from readers in one issue.

Teacher Sharon Lemburg, the wife of an Assembly of God minister, defended the course she designed in a letter to the editor.

"I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach," she wrote.

The original description said the class would examine "evolution as a theory and [would] discuss the scientific, biological, and Biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid."

School board members were divided when they learned of the course in December and discovered that the only two supporters of evolution listed as guest lecturers would not be speaking.

One of them, Kenneth Hurst, a parent opposed to the class, became the lead plaintiff in the suit to end it. The other, Nobel prize winner Francis Crick, died in 2004.

"It's a very satisfying outcome," Hurst said yesterday. "Settling the lawsuit out of court avoids a lot of divisiveness in the community."

After the course plan was altered to meet demands of the board, members voted 3-2 in a special Jan. 1 session to approve the class as part of the entire winter session curriculum of electives and remedial classes.

The class started Jan. 3 with 15 students. Under the deal, it must end by Jan. 27.

The settlement was not immediately approved by the court, but some of the parents in the dozen Tehachapi Mountain communities that send their children to the district's schools welcomed the news that the issue was being put to rest.

"There's a real relief that we can get back to the job of teaching," said Paula Harvey, head of the El Tejon Teachers' Association and mother of two high school students. "The emotional level was getting quite high."

Battles over intelligent design are being fought in Georgia and Kansas. The settlement could serve as a warning to other schools considering the subject.

"It might give them pause to think they might be sued and hauled into court," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia.