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HAPPY NEW YEAR
Of School And Church
As schools reopen nationally, the religion debate resumes.
DANIEL KURTZMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Washington
I n Kansas, the state school board
Ac u RA
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9/10
1999
32 Detroit Jewish News
decides to remove evolution
from its science curriculum.
In Cleveland, a federal judge
throws parents and students into a
state of turmoil when he blocks a
state-funded school voucher program
that lets students attend private or
parochial schools at taxpayer expense
— and then reverses his decision.
In Mississippi, school officials bar a
student from displaying a Star of
David symbol in class and then change
their policy concerning "gang symbols"
in the face of a public outcry.
Elsewhere around the country;
school districts contemplate posting the
Ten Commandments to help counter
what they see as a lapse in morality.
As the school year begins, no
ground has proved more fertile in the
ongoing debate over the constitutional
separation of church and state than
America's public schools.
While church-state watchdogs say
there is no evidence of any trend link-
ing the disparate controversies that
have been playing out across the coun-
try, such issues appear to have gained a
higher profile in recent months.
In recent years, prayer in public
schools and during graduation cere-
monies has been the primary source of
church-state contention. Now issues such
as school vouchers and displaying the Ten
Commandments — topics that are play-
ing out in both the political and educa-
tional arenas — have been providing
additional grist for the church-state mill.
Schools have long provided a test-
ing ground for many of the most divi-
sive issues on the national scene, said
Marc Stern, a lawyer with the
American Jewish Congress.
"If you're going to fight about the
values that the government has and
that are spoken in the name of society,
the only place that surfaces in any sys-
tematic way is in the schools," he said.
Most experts say the recent attention
to religion in schools is simply part of the
normal ebb and flow of the debate.
"These issues kind of wax and
wane," said Joseph Conn, a
spokesman for Americans United for
the Separation of Church and State.
"Right now we're just at one of
those points where there's a lot of dis-
cussion on the issue," he said.
Elected officials around the country
have been pushing the Bible as a solu-
tion to what they say is a breakdown
in morality.
School board officials in Kansas
made no explicit mention of moral
concerns when they voted in August
to delete any references to evolution
from the state's recommended science
curriculum and its standardized tests.
But some observers believe that the
decision reflects parental worries that
their children are growing up without
an agreed-upon moral compass.
Others see a larger trend.
Nathan Diament, director of the
Orthodox Union's Institute for Public
Affairs, sees the focus on religious
issues as a reaction to what he calls a
long-standing "anti-religion" bias in
schools — an attitude he believes is at
odds with the fact that most people in
this -country are religious.
"A lot of this has to do with the fact
that the pendulum swung much too
far in one direction, which is that reli-
gion across the board was really driven
out of the schools, and there's still a
bureaucratic suspicion, if not antipa-
thy, toward religion," Diament said.
Now he said, the pendulum is swing-
ing back because parents have become
"frustrated by seeing such a central
part of their lives trod upon and some-
times abused in their kids schools."
Most church-state watchdogs
emphasize that they are not calling for
America's public schools to become
"religion-free zones.
In fact, most continue to support a
variety of privately initiated religious
activities under a set of guidelines
drafted five years ago by the American
Jewish Congress and a coalition of
religious and public policy groups.
The guidelines were intended to clar-
ify permissible activity to help schools
avoid divisive debates over religious
issues in cases in which the law is clear.
They have since been updated and cir-
culated by the Clinton administration.
"I think these guidelines have gone
a long way toward addressing that
confusion," said Pelavin, formerly of
the AJCongress.
But, he added, "one of the things
we've said all along is that in a country
this size, there are still going to be
school officials that get it wrong." II
"