School Prayer Isn’t in Question, but Wednesday, Supreme Court Will Hear Important Church-State Separation Case
President Donald Trump made a splash last week pretending that students’ right to pray at school has been threatened. While this subject may appeal to his base, the law is settled on this matter.
Education Week‘s Evie Blad explains: “Courts have held that students may pray at school alone or in groups, but that prayer may not be organized or sanctioned by the school… The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, in its current and past versions, requires the U.S. Department of Education to provide guidance on prayer in schools every two years, but that guidance hasn’t been updated since 2003… The new school prayer guidance, published in the Federal Register Thursday morning, reiterates requirements under existing law that school districts must annually certify to their state departments of education that they have ‘no policy prohibiting participation in constitutionally protected prayer’….”
The Washington Post‘s Moriah Balingit and Ariana Eunjung Chah quote Charles Haynes, an expert on this issue at the First Amendment Center’s Freedom Forum: “It’s overdrawn and somewhat political to keep this so-called school prayer fight going… This is in some ways a manufactured crisis because it plays well politically to say, ‘We want God back in schools.'”
Although prayer in school is not really at issue this week, another controversy involving religion and public education will reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices will hear oral arguments on Wednesday in an important case involving the First Amendment’s protection of the separation of church and state. The subject is the long fight over the First Amendment’s prohibition of “establishing” religion, in this case by using public tax dollars to pay for CONTINUE READING: School Prayer Isn’t in Question, but Wednesday, Supreme Court Will Hear Important Church-State Separation Case | janresseger
