Saving Souls at School

I wasn't aware of this until I read this story on the front page of today's WSJ.  I have no problem with giving religious groups the same rights as any other group to use school facilities after hours, but to allow TEACHERS at the school to lead religious classes filled with their OWN STUDENTS?!  This is obviously correct:

"It's unrealistic to think that elementary-age children can distinguish when their teacher during the school day all of a sudden becomes a private citizen after the school day," she says. "I'm fully aware this is the law now, but it doesn't reflect a whole lot of common sense to me or knowledge of children. De facto, you're having your school employees promoting one type of religion or another."

What an unbelieable ruling by this court:

In 2002 the school board in Sioux Falls, S.D., barred third-grade teacher Barbara Wigg from leading a Good News club at her school. Represented by Liberty Counsel, a Florida nonprofit, she sued the board. In September 2004, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis sided with Mrs. Wigg, ruling that the district was unnecessarily restricting "the ability of its employees to engage in private religious speech on their own time."

The school board decided not to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case, but the issue could end up in federal courts elsewhere. "It's a bizarre holding," says Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress, who informally advised the Sioux Falls school board. The principle that a teacher on school property remains a teacher after school, he believes, is "so simple only a federal judge could miss it."

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Saving Souls at School

Thanks to court rulings, some teachers are leading Bible clubs in their own classrooms after the bell.

By DANIEL GOLDEN
May 20, 2006; Page A1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114808797955758615-search.html?KEYWORDS=saving+souls&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month

DURHAM, N.C. -- Brittany Garnett, a fourth grader at Little River Elementary here, studies math and reading under classroom teacher Andy Crutchfield and learns to play the recorder from music teacher Jenny Hobgood.

But every Tuesday, in their classrooms after school, Mr. Crutchfield and Mrs. Hobgood instruct Brittany in something else -- the Bible. At least a dozen teachers and staff members at the public school run the "Good News" Christian club. Attendance in the group, which started in January, has swelled to more than a fifth of Little River's enrollment.

To maintain separation of church and state, public school teachers may not promote religion during school hours. But some teachers are doing so right after their school day ends, thanks to two court rulings. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of religious groups to spread their message to children in elementary schools after hours. Three years later, a federal appeals court ruled that it is legal for teachers to participate in such clubs.