Write the DCPS Board Members and tell them NO to prayers at school board meetings

For the first time since I’ve been watching Duval County Public Schools (DCPS) board meetings, a “in Jesus’ name we pray” prayer was said at a DCPS board meeting. It was December 9th and it was the first meeting for the five Moms For Liberty endorsed school board members. Admittedly I am worried about the Christian Nationalist movement and what newly elected DCPS Board Chair Charlotte Joyce means when she calls herself and other board members “conservative.” I googled to help me distinguish the two. I was offered this:

Christian nationalism is distinct from conventional Christian conservatism. The former typically want some level of explicit state established Christianity. The latter affirm traditional American concepts of full religious liberty for all. 

Please write the DCPS Board.

Dear School Board Members,

The two most recent federal court cases addressing prayer at school board meetings are American Humanists v. McCarty and the 2018 Ninth Circuit case of Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education.

The latest federal circuit decision was the 2018 Ninth Circuit case of Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education. In it, the court determined that a public school board meeting prayer in the presence of “student attendees and participants” was a violation of the Establishment Clause.

I hope our DCPS school board will honor our Constitution. It would set a terrible example if you didn’t. What kind of message does it send for you to NOT honor the separation of church and state? As Thomas Jefferson said in the letter to the Danbury Baptists, “… the whole American people declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.“

I hope there isn’t a majority on our school board who are Christian Nationalists defined as wanting some level of explicit state established Christianity. Christian conservatives (in contrast to Christian Nationalists) affirm traditional American concepts of religious liberty for all. 

Here’s the email addresses for the DCPS Board Members:

Excerpts from this article (see link below):

The court determined that many of the school children, who were active meeting participants, were not attending in a “truly voluntary” way and stood in an unequal relationship with the board.  Also, unlike adults, these minors and adolescents were “more vulnerable to outside influence” and indoctrination, especially with respect to the pressures to “conform to social norms and adult expectations.” Consequently, this audience of “large numbers of children and adolescents, in a setting under the control of public-school authorities,” was deemed “inconsonant with the legislative-prayer tradition.”  At the outset of its opinion, the Ninth Circuit emphasized the dual purposes of the Establishment Clause as safeguarding both “individual freedom and the democratic nature of our system of government. So, while this religion clause protects “the individual’s freedom to believe, to worship, and to express [oneself] in accordance with the dictates of [one’s] own conscience,” it also “ensures that the government in no way acts to make belief—whether theistic or nontheistic, religious or nonreligious—relevant to an individual’s membership or standing in our political community. For the court, the core truth of the Establishment Clause was that individuals have “a valued place in the political community,” regardless of their religious or conscientious beliefs. This truth required both judicial awareness that children cannot be treated like “miniature adults” and judicial vigilance in analyzing religious activities within the public school setting due to their impact on values formation in school children. Consequently, the federal courts should no longer uphold school board meeting prayers. These prayers encroach upon the religious and conscientious liberties of the minor schoolchildren who are most impacted by this coercive, State-sponsored religious speech; they allow the State to transverse the boundaries of religious sanctity; and they give rise to majoritarian governmental orthodoxy.527 These are all undeniable Establishment Clause violations. It is time for principled judicial decision-making from all federal courts, including the Supreme Court, which aligns with seventy-five years of established school prayer jurisprudence, to end these significant constitutional abuses.

The Powerful Problem of Prayer at Public School Board Meetings

About Susan

Susan joined the First Coast Freethought Society in 2008 after hearing about the organization on NPR. Susan has coordinated the FCFS book group since 2016. She retired in 2018 after working as a CPA for 42 years! Now, she is a member of the Advocacy Overview Committee for FCFS.
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