Essential to the Success of our Observations

I first one want to thank you for your confidence in me to come up with some solutions to our dilemma. Our students and community are important to our success and seeing the involvement of our community and school working together is important for our students success. I am sure our community of families and students appreciate our diligence and attention to the matter. The first amendment of our constitution allows all persons in our country to have a freedom of speech and a freedom to follow whichever religion or belief they wish.

It is important to our society and country to follow this as specified and determined by our justice system in its rulings. As the first amendment states,“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” Important to note this specially pertains to our United States government suppressing any citizen’s rights, but as a public school it is equally important for us to hold ourselves to a high moral responsibility and not infringe on any believers of any religion nor any non believers.

Respecting, learning and coming together in our differences, cultures and backgrounds is what makes our school great and will create an opportunity to be a leader and innovator in education in our community, state and country. The Equal Access act you mention definitely explains clearly that all clubs or student organizations have their own qual space, time and resources as other non-religious clubs. We, as a school and staff must remember that preserving their equal right still allows us to monitor meetings and setup or own times that are sufficient to our school schedules just as we would any other group.

I would also suggest we create and input a course or courses on world religions and cultures. In doing so as an elective course, we can educate those who are curious about other religions while providing a forum and dialogue between our communities voluntarily. However, we must train and inform our teachers and staff that any instruction must not show any bias toward any specific religion or belief and that any information shared from students about their own religion or belief will only be done so only voluntarily and without any repercussion whatsoever from other students, staff or community. It is simply to inform others of their history and cultural background and significance as well as the religions contributions to the development of the world. It is not a course to determine, compare or contrast religions to see which is superior. It is simply a course of religious information as it relates to history. We are a country of diversity and the course/courses should reflect this.

As the supreme court case Abington School District v. Schempp mentions, “no bible shall be read in a school sponsored setting.” Importantly, any course that is part of our school curriculum that includes any religious instruction shall not include the bible or any other religious text or influential material. Instruction should instead focus on items mentioned above and any other text shall be approved by a diverse set of individuals who will follow similar guidelines that is sensitive and aware of our constitution, students, community and parents and can be verified through current district wide historical approved textbooks. Furthermore any parent or guardian of a student wishing to inquire further about school policies we can notate that there are free and tuition based religious private institutions that do have policies in place that would allow certain teachings to their preference but we do hope and prefer they would choose to learn with us and grow together as a diverse community.

I also would recommend we use the Three R’s project as seen here as a guideline. Specifically, the respect category. As it states “Debate and disagreement are natural elements of democracy. Yet, if we are to live with our differences, not only what we debate, but how we debate is critical. A strong democracy and strong schools rest on a commitment by people of differing convictions to treat one another with civility.” (California) It is imperative that we drive home that our classroom, school, community, state and country are built on diversity, differences and compromise. With these factors I believe we can not only respect the wishes of the students and parents wanting to meet up but still abide by our constitution and school polices by working with these groups to create guidelines.

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