Written by Don Byrd
Religious leaders usually mean well when they want to get involved at by supporting students in their community’s public schools. School officials face potential problems, however, when their conversation with students turns to religion. In one Washington state school, youth ministers who volunteered as cafeteria supervisors have been asked not to return, pending an investigation to determine whether they exploited the opportunity to proselytize.
Bainbridge Island Public Schools said parents brought the complaints to a district administrator last week.
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Woodward’s principal wrote an email to parents on Tuesday night saying in part, “I have not had a single report of any of our volunteers proselytizing or recruiting students on campus. However, we are taking the concerns brought forward seriously. To ensure that volunteers in our school have been complying with all district policies, we will be having a non-district employee talk with students, staff and parents for the purpose of fact-finding and determining if anyone has violated our policy,” said Mike Florian.
Meanwhile, in Hamilton County, Tennessee, school officials have had to re-train teachers on the separation of church and state after a visiting minister regaled public school students with his religious views during a speech about September 11, 2001.
At least in the case of the youth ministers, they claim they did not proselytize or discuss religion or their church with students, and re only there to help. Pastor Alan Stewart, who caused a re-train of an entire county’s faculty on church-state separation because he believes he should be allowed to preach his religion to a captive audience of young people as a part of government-funded, mandatory education.
Church leaders can absolutely be a positive, appropriate part of school volunteerism in their communities. But school officials should be clear about the rules, and should protect students from evangelism on school grounds during the school day. Parents and the students themselves should be in control of whether, when, and where they engage in conversations about faith.
