If you want to stay clean, you’d better find Jesus. That’s the message, anyway, that Moore Middle School conveyed to its students last fall when it invited the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) to host an anti-drug assembly. At the gathering, the representative for the evangelical ministry handed out forms to students asking them to fill out their name, church, whether have they taken Jesus into their lives before and whether they accepted Jesus that day.
For years, proselytizing incidents like this flourished in Metro public schools, in part because most parents and students shared the same faith and weren’t particularly offended when a teacher led her class in prayer. But the days when an entire class might have belonged to the same Church of Christ congregation have gone the way of the Moral Majority. Today, at any given school in the district, classes are likely to include Jewish children, Muslim children and students whose parents are—shudder, shudder—atheists. Even many devout Christian parents realize that while there may be a place for religion in the classroom, there is no place for preaching. Mostly because it’s against the law.
“There is not a whole lot of gray area,” says John Ferguson, an attorney specializing in First Amendment law for, appropriately enough, the First Amendment Center. “For the most part, the law is clear: Teachers and schools can’t endorse or promote a religion. They need to be neutral to protect the rights of all students.”
After the FCA assembly, parents complained to Margaret Bass, the first-year principal at Moore, about the religious nature of the assembly. Although the assembly, titled “One Way to Play,” was optional, its anti-drug topic didn’t suggest that it would include preaching to kids about taking Jesus into their lives.
Bass says that she didn’t know that FCA made explicit overtures to Jesus Christ—hint, check out their name—and when she found out what happened, she decided she wouldn’t invite the group back. FCA had been speaking to the Granny White Pike middle school for nearly 15 years. “Because it was optional, I didn’t have a problem with it, but after I saw how concerned some parents were, I won’t have them next time,” Bass says.
FCA officials say that a failure of communication—and not a planned intent to preach—resulted in last fall’s mishap. The speaker of the assembly simply didn’t know the proper parameters of his anti-drug talk. “That was a mistake on our part,” says Steve Robinson, the director of the Nashville/Middle Tennessee office of FCA and a former football player at the University of Tennessee. “We’re always up front. When a teacher tells us we can’t mention God or Jesus, we won’t do that.”
Still, as Robinson himself concedes, FCA is a “Christian ministry, and we don’t apologize for that.” FCA is by all accounts a fine and very popular organization with chapters throughout the United States. But perhaps it isn’t the best organization to be speaking to kids of different faiths in the middle of the school day. (Whatever happened to DARE, anyway?)
While there remains no concrete data on cases where schools and teachers promote Christianity, more than a few observers say that they are hearing more complaints about these issues than ever before. Some incidents fall into a gray area, like when teachers and students stray into conversation about God. Other instances that parents cite—including teachers and coaches leading their kids in organized prayer—are neither gray nor advisable. They’re against the law.
“The list of violations is growing,” says Hedy Weinberg, the executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. “I’m used to hearing about these types of violations in many counties across the state, but it’s unusual to be hearing about them in Metro.”
Last March, the First Amendment Center’s Ferguson says, he received more calls about incidents of religious promotion than any other month in six years, not including the month of December. Recently, three students told him that their coach requires them to join FCA before joining the team. What makes that even more egregious, Ferguson says, is that the organization requires students to pay a fee before becoming members.
Many parents complain that President George Bush’s new education guidelines blur the age-old lines between church and state and have prompted episodes of classroom preaching. But, Ferguson says, “The new guidelines are not a radical departure from the past,” and if anything they threaten to cut funding to schools that fail to adhere to their fundamental division of church and state. So if Bush isn’t the scapegoat, who is?
Many parents blame schools director Pedro Garcia, who keeps a copy of Deuteronomy 31:8 in his wallet. It reads: “And the Lord is one who goes ahead of you, he will be with you, he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.”
But dismayed is just what many Jewish parents were last fall when the school system held parent/teacher conferences on Yom Kippur. Then there was the school system’s anti-discrimination policy, which until recently said that it would not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, handicap and age. The policy did not include religion, or at least it didn’t state that it did. The system added religion after parents complained, though officials told the Scene that it was a simple mistake on the Web site.
Last week, the executive committee of the Covenant Association, an interfaith clergy association, mailed a letter to Garcia saying “religious discrimination is being experienced by students at the system.” The letter didn’t cite any specific examples, but it blamed the administration for not paying enough attention to issues of religious tolerance.
“These are incidents that are not necessarily related to each other, but they are not being addressed when they occur,” says Rev. Janet Hilley, the executive director of the Covenant Association and a Metro parent. “It’s a problem throughout the school system.”
Also last February, the Hillsboro Cluster Parent Group sent a letter to Garcia citing its concern about the lack of enforcement of the school board’s religion policy. That policy made it very clear, if it was not already, that teachers could have no part in organizing prayer.
“During our group discussion, we discovered many of us had personal experiences involving teachers directly preaching to students or promoting religion,” the letter stated.
“There are times when my children have been told to pray for something or that they would go to Hell,” says David Kern, the co-chairman of the Hillsboro Cluster Parent Group. “They have been told by teachers how important it is to wake up every morning and pray.”
The Hillsboro parents asked that Garcia, who has made teacher and principal training the cornerstone of his efforts, include sessions about how to handle religion as well.
“Dr. Garcia and the central administration have been responsive to many parental concerns, but they have been apathetic to concerns about religious tolerance,” says Eliza Erhardt-Eisen, a parent of two children in the system.
Next fall, Erhardt-Eisen, who is Jewish, will send her son to University School of Nashville, instead of Moore Middle or the Meigs Academic Magnet School. She cites numerous examples of religious insensitivity in some Metro schools. In one case, her son’s fourth grade chorus performed at a YMCA prayer breakfast. “At the same time the central administration has been talking about diversity, they have almost neglected religious diversity, almost fostering an intolerant atmosphere. And they have done an abysmal job of implementing their own religion policy.”
Garcia says that he and the central office have stressed to teachers and principals that they can’t promote any particular faith at school. “I don’t think we have done a bad job,” he says. “When there are violations, we hear about it and we deal with it. This is not something we take lightly.”
Still, Garcia concedes that neither he nor his underlings discussed with the principals the new federal guidelines on religion, “step by step,” as many parents think they should have. But, he says, they didn’t ignore them either. No matter how much it’s stressed that teachers can’t preach in the classroom, Garcia says people are always going to break the rules. “You have 5,600 teachers out there. Once in a while somebody does something that is not empathetic and that isn’t something they should do.”
Many parents are suspicious of Garcia, in part because he is a devout Christian and has made no attempt to keep that a secret, not that he should have to. But he opposes not just the broad incursions of religion into the classroom, but the more subtle ones as well. “Last year, I said that during Christmas we should all sing “Jingle Bells” and not “Silent Night” during Christmas, and I got all sorts of calls calling me a heathen.”
In fact, some parents say that the public school system should go out of its way to acknowledge the Christian faith of the majority of its students. Brenda Prescott, the Parent Teacher Student Organization president for Antioch High School, deflects criticism that Metro is subtly endorsing Christianity. That’s the dominant faith in the system, she says, and to whitewash it from the school day discriminates against Christians more than anyone else. Like many parents in the system, Prescott is an unabashed proponent of school prayer, explaining her position by citing the Bible. “Jesus says, 'I am the way, the truth and the light. No man comes to the father, but through me,’ ” she says. “Truth lies not relative to the situation. Truth is Christ.”
And many Metro teachers and principals might very well say “Amen” to that.
