School Faces Legal Action for Banning Students' Recess Bible Study
by Jim Brown
May 18, 2005
(AgapePress) - An elementary school in Knoxville, Tennessee, has been threatened with a federal lawsuit after its principal told a group of young students they cannot study their Bibles during recess or even bring their Bibles to school.Until recently, 10-year-old Luke Whitson and his friends had been reading from their Bibles and discussing scripture at school during non-instructional time. But not long ago, the children were stopped on the playground and told by the school principal that they could no longer hold their informal Bible study during recess, and that they must not bring their Bibles to Karns Elementary School again.
The students and some of their parents were upset by the principal's actions. After complaining to the school, Whitson's parents sought legal assistance from Alliance Defense Fund member attorney Charles Pope of the legal group JMF Counsel. Pope wrote a letter to the Knoxville elementary school on the family's behalf, demanding that the Bible study ban be dropped by Friday and that the Knox County School District "immediately issue a statement addressing the unconstitutional actions and policy" and alerting all school personnel that the students in question and others were to be permitted to "exercise their constitutional rights."
The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is America's largest legal alliance defending religious liberty through education, strategy, funding, and litigation. ADF senior counsel Joseph Infranco says the school's actions infringed upon the constitutional freedoms of Whitson and his schoolmates, and ADF is prepared to take the district officials to court over it.
"The Constitution does not prohibit Bibles during recess," Infranco contends. "If anything, it prohibits the banning of Bibles during recess. These students have First Amendment rights. And we have told the school that they have to back down from this unconstitutional position, or we will file suit."
The kind of censorship that Karns Elementary's principal committed is something that happens in school all around the U.S., and ADF's senior counsel believes it is sometimes the result of people mistakenly assuming that the U.S. Constitution's Establishment Clause -- the so-called "separation of church and state" -- requires them to censor religious speech.
"We always try to give people the benefit of the doubt," Infranco says. "We assume that perhaps people are uninformed. When we inform them of the law, if we find they persist in that position, then that kind of speaks for itself. It reveals it as anti-Christian bias. I think sometimes that anti-Christian bias is by design."
Whether teachers and administrators who restrict students' religious liberty are the victims of uninformed, "passive anti-Christian bias" or whether the educators censor expressions of faith out of active hostility towards religion, Infranco insists those school officials are on the wrong side of the law. "There are no 'age discrimination' allowances in the First Amendment of the Constitution," the ADF spokesman notes. "Children have rights of speech and association during their non-instructional time, and schools may not curtail those rights because of the children's age."
ADF hopes the letter from Pope informing the school district of the students' constitutional rights will clear up the situation at Karns Elementary. An important part of the legal alliance's mission, Infranco notes, is to help schools understand what the law really says so they can create constitutionally sound policies. However, he says the school will be sued if it has not ceased its religious censorship by Friday.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
