By Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
A Christian legal group is working to ensure that public school students are not impeded in their prayer activities in connection with this year's “See You at the Pole — National Day of Student Prayer” event.
On Wednesday, September 17th, students across America will be united in spirit for the 14th annual SYATP event. Participants in the grassroots movement will gather around campus flagpoles before school to pray for their schools, friends, teachers, government and country.
Ben Bull, an attorney with the Phoenix, Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, says his group has mailed a legal analysis to 50 state departments of education and to several of the nation's largest school districts, informing them of the constitutionality of the annual event.
Bull says the right of students to pray and engage in religious expression has already been settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. The group sent out the legal analysis to make it clear to administrators that schools will be held accountable for abridging students' rights to religious freedom.
“Each year we get dozens of phone calls from students who are told by school administrators around the country that students cannot pray as a group around the flagpole. Frankly, it's gotten so crazy that we felt this unusual measure was necessary in order to make sure that schools cannot claim ignorance, or [claim] that they don't know students have a constitutional right to pray whenever and wherever they want on school campuses,” Bull says.
According to the attorney, the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly ruled that students can engage in silent or audible prayer wherever they are allowed to be on campus, whether in a cafeteria, a restroom, or standing in front of a school flagpole.
Bull says schools that try to censor SYATP events will face potential federal litigation, which he says “will result in attorneys' fees, possible damages, other sanctions that can be imposed by federal courts.” He adds that those schools' officials “will be embarrassed and shown to be religious bigots.”
SYATP began more than a decade ago when a group of teenagers from Burleston, Texas, decided during a discipleship retreat to go to three schools and pray at each campus' flagpole for their friends and fellow students. A few months later, over 20,000 teenagers at a 1990 youth rally in Dallas, Texas, were challenged to organize prayer sessions at their schools, following the Burleston teens' example. About 45,000 students at 1,200 schools in four states did so, holding the first organized flagpole prayer event on September 12, 1990 at 7:00 a.m. The movement went national a year later. In 2002, more than 2.5 million teenagers met for See You at the Pole in all 50 states.
Coinciding with this year's one-day SYATP observance, youth around the world will observe a global Youth Prayer Week from September 14-20, sponsored by the Youth Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
