Proselytizing in Public Schools

Last December, the ACLU of Louisiana brought the Webster Parish School District to court for its blatant practicing of religion in the public schools.  Every morning many of the schools in this district have a student volunteer read Bible verses or the Lord’s prayer over the school speaker system. Not only do the days at these schools start off with prayer, but prayers are commonplace in the school events hosted by this school district.  The school has also been known to include prayer during pep rallies, assemblies, and other athletic events. One year, they even hired a Christian rapper, Mynista, to come to the school and preach to the students. The Lakeside school, which is the main subject of this case, even holds its graduation services in churches. K.C. Cole, who attended Lakeside, a school in this district, and her mother had had enough of these practices and eventually worked with the ACLU to file a lawsuit against the district.  Many teachers and school officials at the Lakeside school “imply that students must take the Bible literally and have stated that evolution is a ‘fairy tale’.” One teacher has daily objectives hanging in their classroom which include “Love God!”, “Study His Word”, and “Pray Daily!” among others. The ACLU and the Cole family believe that Lakeside school’s practices are in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. When these concerns were brought to the district, Johnny Rowland, who was the principal of Lakeside at the time and is now the district superintendent stated, “I’ll stop when someone makes me stop.”

The main question in this case is whether Lakeside’s practices involving religion such as holding prayer at the beginning of the day, prosthelytizing during athletic events, and having blatant references to religion on the walls of classrooms constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

I think that this school district’s practices are without a doubt in violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” and this school is definitely violating this law.  This school district is directly favoring Christianity, and is making the government funded, public school into a place of worship for students and teachers. Public schools are supposed to be secular entities because they are funded by the government. Allowing public schools to preference religion or to preach religion in any way is a violation of the First Amendment.

In order to be sure that this district’s practices constitution a breach of the Establishment Clause, I chose to invoke the Lemon Test which came about in the case Lemon v. Kurtzman. The three prongs of this test require that a statute must have a secular legislative purpose, its primary effect must not advance or inhibit religion, and the statute must not foster excessive entanglement with religion. The morning prayer as well as the other religious aspects in this school definitely do not have a secular purpose. The sole purpose of these practices is to advance religion and to push Christianity on students. In terms of this statutes primary effect, its primary effect is undoubtedly to advance Christianity. Finally, this statute does foster excessive entanglement between Church and State because it is a government funded school endorsing religion. This statute both fails the Lemon Test and is extremely coercive in nature, and is therefore unconstitutional.

While people in this school are not forced to stand during prayer, K.C., who’s family filed the suit, claimed that “other students ridiculed her.”  Additionally, when her parents refused to stand during the graduation prayers, “other parents hissed in disapproval.” K.C., who is agnostic, said that she was ridiculed by her teacher when she questioned the Bible and when she questioned the teaching that evolution is a fairy tale.  While I do not think this is enough to consider this an unconstitutional violation of Free Exercise, because technically neither the parents nor the students are being forced to participate, I do think that these practices are discriminatory towards religious minorities. If these teachers want to prosthelytize and preach their religion, they should be teaching in a private, Catholic school. Public schools are supposed to stay secular, and students attending these schools are supposed to be receiving a secular and equal education.

The part of this case in which the teachers are teaching their students that evolution is a fairy tale is similar to the case Edwards v. Aguillard in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require that creationism, or creation science, be taught alongside evolution. The Lakeside school case takes this even further by not teaching evolution at all.

This school’s practices involving religion are without a doubt a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  The school district is promoting Christianity and is pushing Christianity on the students. A public school, because it is government funded, is supposed to be a secular institution with a secular education and this district violates this precedent in many ways.