Adam Graham sent this link along…
Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.
Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.
Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day’s schedule included a “school assembly” in the gym after lunch.
Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform “their ritual washing.”
Afterward, Getz said, “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day,” was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man “was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered.”
“The prayer I saw was not voluntary,” Getz said. “The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred.”
You can all the religion you want in your private school. Stop using my tax money to promote religion!
1 response so far ↓
1 Terry of Astoria // Apr 26, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Sure is horrible these days how people forget about God.
This horrible woman to thinks it’s bad to have a required religious assembly in a public school in America.
(sound of air escaping from my lips) –
She’s obviously demented to suggest it is bad to teach all the kids the same religion in a public school. Who cares that they may come from a different religious culture? It’s good for their spirit. Any teacher ought to be allowed to pick a religion and teach it to their students exclusively. What could be wrong with that? Oh, wait. What about the students from other religions who might be offended, or persecuted as a result?
Hmm…. Maybe a better way would be to allow everyone to keep their own religious freedom. Maybe we should separate the church from the state and pass laws that say everyone’s free to worship their own way as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Oh, yeah, we already have that. It’s the constitution. Well, considering the beating that document has taken from the Patriot Act and that the freedoms it guarantees us are being taken away one by one, I suppose perhaps soon it’ll be a moot point.
But SERIOUSLY, prayer has not been removed from school. Freedom of religion means you are free to worship your own way. Think about it. Public prayer would be forcing a certain type of worship on kids. That’s not freedom. Kids are not prevented from worshipping in school. Many schools in America have prayer groups, religious groups, etc. They are simply required to do it in such a way as to make participation voluntary.
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