Catalogs focusing on holiday gifts appropriate for my grandchildren have arrived. Our local drug store has had a display adjacent to its cash registers for quite a while offering pre-Christmas season buys (and shelves are still stacked with leftover Halloween goodies).
So a key community-based question comes to mind: Where is the report and subsequent policy deliberations on holiday celebrations and related issues in our public schools responding to last December’s administrative “ineptness?” This is not rocket science. Case law points the way. Americans United for Separation of Church and States has historically monitored such litigation.
As a supporter of Americans United, here is a quick rundown of what can and cannot take place. Of course, our schools may acknowledge cultural aspects of religious holidays. We teach about them objectively. As for those concerts, religious music along with secular selections may be included.
But, we do not celebrate holidays in a way that promotes religion.
When it comes to student assemblies, we may not sponsor programs that feature prayer or other religious activity. And as we have known for decades, schools may not sponsor prayer, Bible reading or others forms of worship. (Students have the right to pray in a nondisruptive way on their own time. As the venerated bromide goes: as long as we have testing in schools, we will have praying.)
Yes, the Bible can be taught objectively as part of a course on world religions and the role of religion in history also can be taught as long as it is presented in a fair manner absent dogmatic pronouncements.
As for religious clubs, the emphasis is on secondary school students forming religious clubs that meet during “noninstructional” time. They are run by students, not school personnel. However, allowing religious clubs means that other noncurriculum groups, such as gay-straight alliances and nonreligious clubs, must also be permitted.
Our schools need not be “religion free” as long as we avoid sponsoring or promoting religious activity.
Norm Goldman
Hopewell Township