School Panel Urged to Ban Bible Study at Class Time

In a faltering voice, a mother rose to address the Orange Unified School Board.

She carefully explained that she was not against religion or its teaching, but she worried about religious instruction during public school hours affecting education, especially for those children, like hers, not taking part in Bible study.

Thus began a controversy that is still unfolding in Orange Unified School District--a dispute over religion during class hours that could potentially affect all of California.

At issue is a 43-year-old state law that permits a school district to release children from their classrooms for Bible study and other religious instruction. Seldom questioned in the past, the law now faces a challenge from the heart of California’s most conservative urban county.

Opposition Stated

The controversy arose at an Oct. 23 school board meeting from questions raised by Rochelle Maynard of Orange, who has a daughter in the fourth grade. Holding a prepared statement in hands that trembled as she spoke, Maynard said, “My conscience dictates that I state . . . my opposition to the religious release time in Orange Unified and wherever else it still exists.”

She added that she had “no argument with the need for moral and Christian virtues in our youth. I only ask that they do it on their own time and not flaunt religion where it is not appropriate.”

“Any open-minded person,” Maynard added, “would recognize the blatant and subtle discrimination involved.”

Occasional disputes, prompted most often by civil libertarians, have emerged over the obscure state law, whose constitutionality was upheld in 1947 by a state Court of Appeal. The law has never been challenged in a federal court, but a similar law in the state of New York was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the California attorney general’s office.

In the Orange Unified School District, which serves the cities of Orange and Villa Park and parts of Anaheim, Garden Grove and Santa Ana, released time for religious study has existed for 33 years. Now, board members must decide whether the district should continue to allow fourth- and fifth-graders to walk from their classrooms one day a week to a trailer parked off school grounds. Inside the trailer, which is moved from school to school in the district on scheduled days, the students listen as religious instructors discuss the Bible and morals. The law does not stipulate any grade.

There are now about 3,200 fourth- and fifth-graders in the Orange school district, and about half of them have parental permission to take part in the 40-minute religion class. Students whose parents don’t want them to participate in the program remain in their regular classroom.

There are four other school districts in Orange County with such programs--Anaheim CityElementary, Magnolia Elementary, Yorba Linda Elementary and Fullerton Elementary. The programs also exist in many other public school districts throughout the state. Los Angeles Unified School District has the largest.

Maynard’s statements prompted the school board to discuss the program at its Nov. 13 meeting, which drew speakers from both sides of the issue.

“We are a staff of credentialed teachers, using the Bible as our text,” said Carole Johnson, who is in charge of religious instruction in the Orange school district. “. . . We memorize Bible passages carefully chosen. . . . We do not teach church doctrine.”

Johnson, who works with 14 other privately paid Christian-education teachers who go from school to school in the district, said the release-time program has “enriched the lives of fourth- and fifth-grade students. . . .”

“Over 60% (of the children) have not had prior exposure to the Bible and its teachings,” she said.

In an interview, Johnson said the program in the Orange district is funded by 19 participating churches, has a yearly budget “in the $60,000 range” and pays instructors according to the number of days and classes they teach. Although the state law doesn’t require it, Johnson said the instructors in her program all have teaching credentials, some from other states.

Johnson said she didn’t want to specify how much her teachers make, but she noted that it is only a small amount. “If a person needed to make money, she wouldn’t do this kind of teaching,” she said. “It’s only about one-third as much as a substitute teacher can make.” (Substitute teachers in Orange Unified School District are paid $68 a day and long-term subs earn $78 under a pay scale that will become effective Jan. 1. Long-term subs must work 10 consecutive days on one job.)

Carol Saukkola, a parent in favor of the Christian-education program, said: “There is absolutely no encouragement by the school to participate in this community-sponsored program, but on the other hand, allowing it to exist indicates to the community that the school is concerned for the welfare of the whole child, including his spiritual welfare if his parents so choose.”

Opponents of religious release time told the school board that they aren’t anti-Bible or anti-religion. Their central argument was that religious education shouldn’t be conducted during school hours.

“What is the district’s rationale for continuing such a practice?” asked Carol Pei, a parent. She wondered how the instruction can continue at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court has banned classroom prayer.

Another parent complained about pressure the program places on children who don’t participate.

“For a 9-year-old who watches her friends attend a weekly session, and then has to explain to her friends why she doesn’t attend, it can be very traumatic,” said Steven Edelman, who described himself as the parent of a fourth-grader and the Orange County regional director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. “Kids should not be exposed to additional pressure because of their religious belief,” he added.

The ADL monitors discrimination against people of the Jewish faith and against other minorities. Edelman told the school board that the ADL has been concerned that Orange Unified School District allows elementary schools to conduct newspaper drives to help pay for the religious study program. He said he believes that “fund-raising that is carried on by a school to subsidize a ‘Chapel on Wheels’ is clearly violative of church and state separation.”

Rochelle Maynard’s husband, Charles, who teaches in the North Orange County Regional Occupation Program, told the board he thinks that it is unconstitutional for public schools to get paid state ADA (average daily attendance) money for class time when students are absent and are being taught religion.

State officials, however, have said that the existing law clearly allows daily-attendance funding for all students, including those excused for religious study.

Johnson, the program director, described most of the public school teachers in Orange Unified’s fourth and fifth grades as “cooperative” about the release time but said some teachers are “anti-religion.” She said some teachers introduce new material to students who remain in class, which puts pressure on the parents of students in the religious classes to keep their children on school grounds.

Mark Rona, president of the Orange Unified Educators Assn., expressed doubts that any teachers are deliberately trying to undermine religious study. He said the program is seldom brought up at teacher union meetings, although occasionally teachers will discuss what they should be doing while the release-time students are gone and only part of the class remains.

Parents who oppose the program argue that children not taking religious instruction have 40 minutes of wasted education time, a point denied by Johnson and other supporters. “Students who remain in their classes work on their spelling words and do other things the teacher assigns them,” Johnson said.

But the California chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union deplore the program because they claim it intrudes into regular class time.

“We wouldn’t mind if the children went to these (religion) classes immediately after school, but significantly, supporters of the program don’t want to have it that way,” said Margaret Crosby, a staff attorney with ACLU’s Northern California office in San Francisco. She said the ACLU believes that an element of “coercion” and “peer pressure” enters into it because children who don’t leave class for religious instruction “stand out as pagans or little atheists.”

Crosby, however, said the ACLU has mounted no legal challenges to the law in recent years.

Helen Colburn, a religion teacher who supervises release-time programs serving both the Anaheim City Elementary and Magnolia Elementary school districts, said her program came under attack by some parents two years ago “and we had to defend ourselves to the (school) board.”

In the past, Colburn said, some Jewish parents have opposed religious release time in the school districts. She said she tries to inform them that they also can make use of release time for their own religious instruction. And she noted that Roman Catholics have a separate trailer that parks off school grounds in Anaheim City Elementary School District. The other trailer is for interfaith instruction, Colburn said.

Bill Rivera, spokesman for the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, said the release-time program has operated there for more than 40 years--virtually from the beginning of the 1943 state law. “We’ve had no problem with it,” Rivera said. “Almost all of the religious faiths take part, and we have a high participation rate, although I don’t have current figures.”

In Sacramento, officials at the state Department of Education said the program currently causes almost no controversy. “The only place where controversy is coming from is in Orange County, as far as I know,” said Deputy Supt. James Smith.

Orange Unified School District will have no quick end to the debate. A 15-member committee appointed by the district school board to study the release-time program has until June to study the issue and present its report to the board.