Splat

Tonight was my daughter's elementary school (public) "Winter Concert." Four of the six songs were religious, three of them xian. There were 3 plastic wise men statues on the stage.

I'm pretty peeved.

My idea is to write a polite letter pointing out that her choice of religious music for these programs ruins the experience for many of us, and ask her to stop. But I doubt that will have much of an effect.

I'd like to back it up by pointing out the legal issues involved. I'll CC the principal and head administrator for the shcools.

I've looked through the library here and at a couple of other sites, and tried searching the IIDB, but have come up short.

Can anybody point me to some background on the legalities here? (I've searched around on Findlaw and come up short, probably because I don't know what I'm looking for.)

beejay

Here's a link to the Ohio School Boards Association. The statement is from the National School Boards Association.

<a href="http://www.osba-ohio.org/Holidays.html" target="_blank">Religious holidays in public schools</a>

From this, it would certainly seem that the wise men were out of place and 67% of the songs being religious sounds like “domination”. Raising these issues with the administrators may result in a change in future programs.

Splat

Thanks Beekay. That's sort of helpful. Apparantly there isn't any clear case law here.

The teacher in charge seems to know what she's doing, and pushes things to the limit. Each song is preceded by a brief little "educational" introduction, and she's careful not to just bang out a lot of xmas carols. On the program last night were an xian song in Latin (Ho dei Christos or something like that--it was pretty obvious that it was an xian song), one in French, with an English translation verse, One in Spanish, also with translation, a Hanuka song (with the words "God will find us laughing in the sun" repeatedly) and a black spiritual. Plus a song about snow and "Christmas Ho-down."

So it sort of tread right up to the line of being educational, but the total effect was, once again, being bombarded by religion.

And it was such a beautiful thing otherwise...

(This same music teacher put on a program after 9-11 that started with "Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me," and then moved right into a series of military tunes ("Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, Caisons go Rolling Along, Battle Hymn of the Republic, etc., ending with a medley of the armed forces theme songs. The woman is just as sweet as the day is long, but utterly without a sense of irony.)