Teacher With Bible Divides Ohio Town

An Ohio teacher, who apparently forgot that he represents the state, provided a field guide for those who would establish religion in the public schools.

He led his football players in prayers before games; before practices; before team meetings. His district had to settle a $18,000 suit as a result.

Later, he proposed that the school board adopt a policy to teach evolution as theory, not proven scientific fact and was denied. He taught Intelligent Design instead and his colleagues began to complain that when they received his former students they had not mastered the basics, causing them to have to reteach.

Students complained that he said, “Science is wrong because the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin, and so anyone who is gay chooses to be gay and is therefore a sinner.”

Then there was the time he burned a cross (he says it's an X) on the arm of one of his students with a tesla coil.

More recently he posted the Ten Commandments on his classroom door, adorned his room with three more copies of the decalogue and other posters with scripture on it. Supported by a religious activist, he drew battlelines refusing to remove a Bible from the view of his students.

His persistent effort over time to impose his strongly held views promoting a specific religion is the clearest case of establishment of religion in recent memory.

This from the New York Times:

Most people in this quiet all-American town describe themselves as devoutly Christian, but even here they are deeply divided over what should happen to John Freshwater.

Mr. Freshwater, an eighth-grade public school science teacher, is accused of burning a cross onto the arms of at least two students and teaching creationism, charges he says have been fabricated because he refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his desk.

After an investigation, school officials notified Mr. Freshwater in June 2008 of their intent to fire him, but he asked for a pre-termination hearing, which has lasted more than a year and cost the school board more than a half-million dollars.

The hearing is finally scheduled to end Friday, and a verdict on Mr. Freshwater’s fate is expected some months later. But the town — home to about 15,000 people, more than 30 churches and an evangelical university — remains split.

To some, Mr. Freshwater is a hero unfairly punished for standing up for his Christian beliefs. To others, he is a zealot who pushed those beliefs onto students...

KSN&C Backstory:

Texas: Bible Classes Approved

This from the New York Times:

The state’s Board of Education gave final approval to establishing Bible classes in public high schools, rejecting calls to draw specific teaching guidelines and warnings that such approval could lead to constitutional problems in the classroom.

The Legislature passed a measure in 2007 allowing Bible courses to be offered as an elective. State officials are still waiting for an attorney general’s ruling on whether the classes must be offered to students or left to school districts to decide.

Critics say the rule does not provide specific enough guidelines to help teachers and school districts know how to do that and avoid a First Amendment clash over freedom of religion.

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Teacher fired for claiming the Bible should not be taken literally

Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal
The community college instructor says

the school sided with students

offended by his explanation of Adam and Eve.

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday.

He said he was fired Thursday.

"I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school's Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman's employment status. The school's president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue."I can assure you that the college understands our employees' free-speech rights," she said. "There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment."

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman's Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was "denigrating their religion."

"I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more credibility than any other god," Bitterman said.

"I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there."Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale" in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney...

..."As a taxpayer, I'd like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group," he said. "If it has ... then the taxpaying public of Iowa has a right to know.

What's next? Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?"

This from the DesMoines Register.

Is the Bible making a comeback?

Many public school officials feared

teaching about the text after a

U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Now, scholars are trying

to find ways to teach about it

from an academic standpoint.

Some favorite rock songs have taken on new meaning for Meghan Anderson since she discovered the biblical roots of the allusions and wordplay that have inspired her. Some of the required readings in English class are more evocative as well for the sophomore at First Coast High School here as a result of what she learned this year in a class on the Bible.

“There are a lot of different references to the Bible in books and movies and music that I never realized,” she said. “It’s all over the place.”

Pervasive it is. That’s why Harriet Kisilinsky, a veteran English teacher at the 2,300-student school on Florida’s northeast coast, lobbied school officials to offer an introductory course on the Bible and its influence on literature, history, and popular culture...

...“When they started the countywide push for getting more kids into AP, it struck me that these kids don’t have the background they need to succeed,” said Ms. Kisilinsky of the effort to make the rigorous Advanced Placement courses accessible and achievable for a greater proportion of students in the 125,000-student Duval County public school district. “How can you expect them to read Dante’s Inferno and write about it if they don’t understand his nine circles of hell” and other religious themes the text draws on, she wondered...

...A series of reports and books in recent years have contended that it is essential for students to understand biblical content, particularly as it relates to historical documents and events, literature and the arts, and even current events, if they are to be fully educated.

In 1999, the First Amendment Center convened a group of education, religious, and free-speech groups to draft guidelines for teaching about religion in schools. The report by the Arlington, Va.-based think tank tried to dispel the misconception that court decisions of the 1960s—which banned the promotion of religion and religious rituals—prohibited teaching about religion in public schools.

A 2005 survey conducted by the Bible Literacy Project found that while educators reported that students with knowledge of the Bible had a “distinct educational advantage” over their other peers, fewer than one in 10 had access to such courses...

This from Education Week. (Subscription)

The Bible in the Schoolhouse

Colonial era to 19th century: The primary purpose of schooling, in addition to learning the three R’s, is to teach the lessons of the Bible. By the latter decades of the 1800s, Bible “wars” erupt between Protestants and Catholics over which version of the Scriptures will be used for the recitations that mark the school day. State supreme courts in Ohio (1872) and Wisconsin (1890) strike down mandatory Bible reading

1963: On the heels of several court cases on religion in schools, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Abington Township School District v. Schempp that a Pennsylvania law requiring daily recitations of Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer in public school classrooms is unconstitutional. In an 8-1 decision, the court says the Bible may be studied for its literary and historical merits, but may not be used for daily religious exercises in public schools.

1989: A coalition of religious and educational organizations issues guidelines for teaching about religion in public schools, recommending an approach that is academic, not devotional; emphasizes the study of religion, not its practice; exposes students to a diversity of religious views, but does not impose or encourage particular beliefs; and intends to inform students about different beliefs, not have them conform.

1999: The Bible Literacy Project and the First Amendment Center issue a guide to teaching about the Bible in public schools. The guide is endorsed by prominent religious and educational organizations, as well as free-speech groups. Supporters recommend finding middle ground between a traditional “sacred text” approach still evident in some school lessons and a view of public schools as “religion-free zones.”

SOURCES: Bible Literacy Project Inc.; First Amendment Center; Education Week

Bible classes subject of school lawsuit

DALLAS --Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit recently against a West Texas school district on behalf of eight parents who say a Bible course violates their religious liberty.

The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way Foundation sued the Ector County Independent School District, asking the Odessa school system to stop teaching the course.

"Religion is very important in my family and we are very involved in our religious community. But the public schools are no place for religious indoctrination that promotes certain beliefs that not all the kids in the school share," Doug Hildebrand, a Presbyterian deacon who is among the plaintiffs, said in a written statement released by the ACLU.

The Ector school board approved the high school elective in 2005. It teaches the King James version of the sacred text using material produced by the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, and uses the Bible as the students' textbook.

This from the Boston Globe.

Louisiana school district sued over Bibles in school

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday filed its fifth religion-related lawsuit in 13 years against an eastern Louisiana school district, this time alleging that a principal improperly allowed people to distribute Bibles to students.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of the parents of a fifth-grader at Loranger Middle School in Tangipahoa Parish, who were upset that Gideons Bibles were being given to students on school property during class hours.

This from CNN.

Georgia schools cautious on Bible classes

Georgia's public schools walk a delicate line as they decide whether to offer the nation's first state-funded Bible classes -- measuring the difference between preaching and teaching with the likelihood of costly lawsuits looming for those that miss the mark.

The state school board approved curriculum in March for teaching the Bible in Georgia's high schools, but there hasn't been a rush of schools to start up the classes. Only a handful of the state's 180 school districts have agreed to offer the elective classes so far.

This from the Boston Globe.

And this from Texas and the Star-Telegram.

Texas school districts would have to develop guidelines for students to make public expressions of religion under a hotly debated bill that won preliminary approval Monday in the state House.

The measure, House Bill 3678 by Sugar Land Republican Charlie Howard, will face a final vote in the chamber before being sent to the Senate for consideration. It calls for school districts to establish guidelines for students to voluntarily express religious views in “limited public forums.”