La Costa Heights Elementary School students demonstrate yoga for parents and other adults at the Sonima yoga studio in Encinitas on Wednesday.

ENCINITAS The foundation that created a yoga program that sparked a lawsuit and drew international attention to the Encinitas Union School District has quietly introduced similar programs to two other county schools and to schools in New York.

Gene Ruffin, executive director of the Sonima Foundation, said at an open house Wednesday at the foundations headquarters in Encinitas that there has been no controversy in the programs expansion, and he expects to announce two more schools where yoga will be introduced in the near future.

A University of San Diego researcher who attended the open house said a study on the effects of the yoga program in Encinitas has been completed and that it showed yoga had a positive effect on students health.

The results have been fantastic, Ruffin said.

In 2012, Sonima then called the K.P. Jois Foundation gave the Encinitas school district $533,000 to begin a yoga program and to fund a study of its effects. Last summer the foundation gave another $1.4 million to to expand the program to all Encinitas Union schools as part of districts health and wellness curriculum.

The foundation had planned to create a yoga curriculum in Encinitas that could be introduced to other schools, but things got off to a bumpy start when some parents sued the district, arguing the yogra program was religious and a violation of laws regarding the separation of church and state.

Many other families, however, agreed with district officials who saw the yoga program as little more than stretching exercises.

Although the district had changed the name of poses to crisscross applesauce and other child-friendly, secular terms, a lawsuit filed by attorney Dean Broyles, president of the Escondido--based National Center for Law & Policy, argued that the very act of practicing yoga could lead to interest in Hinduism and other Eastern beliefs.

The lawsuit attracted international media attention and concluded last July with San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer siding with the school district.

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School yoga program stretches out