OK so to pray in school you have to be in a club.......  Some group will volunteer to represent these students at no cost.  I think their free speach and freedom of religion rights are being trampled on.  Especially if they were praying in a common area.  This smacks of stupidity on the schools part.  Student led prayer has been upheld in the courts.  Wouldn't forming a school club with a teacher advising it actually make the school run afoul of the Separation crowd?

If they had been praying while having sexual relations, then you'd have a problem.

It just amazes me how far we've turned about some of these issues. That kids on their own would think that it's okay to do some of these things, and yet educators make a stink about prayer!?

I used to not care. Knowing how the teens in my ward pray, as though they're stuck in a dentist chair having all their teeth ripped out of their mouths with no anesthesia, I just figured that teens that wanted to pray at school were probably just doing so to get attention, or to irk the administration, or to 'oppress' students that weren't like them...

Now though, I see the alternative and... We live in the Porno-MySpace generation and well...

It is sickening.

So what if they're using prayer as a weapon... I'd like to clobber a few people with a good Hallelujah once in a while too...

--Ray

Looks like fertile ground for a young new missionary.

I'm coming out:  I AM A HOMESCHOOLING PARENT.

Please know that I think no less of parents who choose to send their kids to public school. In fact, I think there are many, awesome, well administered public schools in this nation.  Our choice to home school was a prayerful consideration of what was best for our circumstances, not a back lash against some of the corruption in the public system.

Having said that, it annoys me to no end when people who discover that we homeschool ( they ask us, we don't broadcast it) begin to immediately interrogate us : "What will you do when they are high school age?  What about their social development and coping skills? How will you prepare them for the real world?"

Knowing what we know about some of the godless corruption in the public schools, maybe I won't be so passive anymore.  Maybe I should start counter-interrogating parents about why they choose to send their kids to public school. Nowadays I hope no one is dumb enough to confront me on the homeschooling issue.  They will get an earfull from me and wish they hadn't said anything.

More power to those of you who homeschool and do so successfully! It's not my cup of herbal infusion, but doesn't mean YMMV. :)

After finally deciding to read the articles Ray linked to, I'm not as up in arms about the issue as I was (and I wasn't much to begin with). I don't believe it was a case of the school saying unilaterally "No you can not do this" but more a "You need to do this by following the established rules".

From the sounds of it, the kids (probably egged on by their youth ministers) were setting it up to be a confrontational situation by not keeping the rules about forming a club with a faculty advisor so that they could have a "public" prayer group at school... and then, the straw that broke the camel's back seemed to be their refusal to stop doing it in a heavy traffic area.

Remembering what some of the born-againers would do when they set up next to us in Bremen Marktplatz some 20 years ago when we would do our street displays, I can well imagine these kids were not just getting together for a quick group opening / closing prayer type thing.

I remember back even longer when I was in high school. We had a poli-sci / sociology / history teacher (who was the father of one of the kids in my graduating class) and he would invite the missionaries in to tell a little about the church and it's history. I would go along as a "joint teach" when I found out (allowed me to skip a couple classes and yet still be in school ) and was able to bear testimony to a number of my class mates. Thinking back on it, was that necessarily appropriate? I don't know. I'm sure some kids got up in arms about it, but I know that a number of the rest of them felt the Spirit, because I could see it in their countenances. Anyway, one of our classes valedictorians pulled a stunt that I will remember him for with less than fondness. At graduation commencement, all the valedictorians got to take the stage and either do their own speech or a skit or what have you (we had like 14 of them out of our class of 500+ who had 4.0's). Some did as a group, others opted to go it solo. Well, the one kid (who had decided he wanted to become a preacher) decides to lead the whole audience (which was filling the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in downtown Columbus -- one of the largest auditoriums in the area at the time) in an evangelical revival type prayer. It was very uncomfortable for many of us, including me who was LDS and shouldn't have had a problem with prayer (right?). It felt like we were being held hostage to it. I found it awkward, uncomfortable, and well... highly inappropriate. It wasn't like going to the baccalaureate where hopefully you know you are in for a religious sermon... (naive me didn't know that was what the baccalaureate was and so was under the impression I and my parents had to go... they suffered it and let me learn I was miffed because the paster (again, the father of one of the kids in my class) had "borrowed" a fair amount of his sermon from a conference talk, but didn't bother to let people know he was quoting a Mormon Apostle...).

Ray, just so long as you're willing to get as good as you give.

I can't figure out how a school thinks they can get away though with forcing the students to form an official group with an advisor.  Wouldn't the school then be actually promoting student prayer which will get them involved in a lawsuit?  Why do students have to be in a club to pray?  Even if their pastor pushed them to do this, I just can't see any other ethnic, minority, or religious group being suspended or punished for it.  Imagine if they were a muslim prayer group.  The national media would be up in arms.

This, in my opinion, is what happens when you try to have schools be entirely religion neutral. Morals and religion go hand in hand. Who are you to tell a kid he can't have sex in the classroom? After all, that's a religious more. Who are you to say kids shouldn't be taught about sex before they're taught long division? That's a religious viewpoint.