Public schools are going back into session around the country, including Florida, where school boards face a conundrum: Should they bring chaplains into the schools?
Florida, the font of many bad ideas these days, passed a law earlier this year allowing chaplains in public schools. Supposedly, the law is designed to help districts provide counseling services to students. The problem is, counselors and chaplains are not the same. The former are trained to provide guidance and mental-health counseling to students, while the latter deal with spiritual issues.
The state has issued a problematic model policy for districts, but many local officials remain skeptical of the idea, among them board members of the Osceola County School District. The school board has been discussing the issue this summer and voted last night against creating a chaplaincy program in the district.
The board members made the right decision, and they should put this matter to rest for good. (You can watch a video of the meeting; several speakers defended the separation of church and state and spoke about the need for qualified counselors for their children, how students of minority faiths and who are nonreligious will feel like outsiders in their own schools and about the harms that LGBTQ+ students could face.)
Prior to the vote, Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, president of the Atlantic Coast Chapter of Americans United, told Central Florida Public Media that the district should not bring chaplains into its schools. He explained why the Florida model policy was so bad.
“Jefferson, Madison, our founders, wanted to save the Florida Department of Education and not allow them to get mired into this mess of deciding who’s a chaplain, who is not and what’s a religion and what’s not,” said Shapiro. “The Florida Department of Education seems to be thumbing its nose at the founders.”
And in fact, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has singled out the Satanic Temple, a nontheistic organization that supports church-state separation, insisting that the group won’t be allowed in schools. But that’s not his call to make. A Satanic Temple leader spoke last night and reminded Osceola board members about the First Amendment: allowing some religious groups to provide chaplains while denying that right to others would be unconstitutional.
A chaplain’s job is to provide spiritual guidance. In some contexts, such as prisons or the military where people can be without access to their home congregations, they make sense. But they have no place in our secular public schools. Students who feel the need for spiritual help can easily get that from members of the clergy outside of school hours. As local Rabbi David Kay of Congregation Ohev Shalom explained at the board meeting, “Bringing religious leaders into the public schools is not only unnecessary, it is counterproductive.”
Americans United has urged Florida school districts to not implement chaplaincy programs. If you are a Florida resident with children in public schools and your district implements a chaplaincy program, contact us at https://www.au.org/report-a-violation.
