Editor’s note: This information is excerpted from AU’s “Know Your Rights” guides for public school students, parents and teachers.
Knowing your rights is not anti-religion. Religious freedom is part of what it means to be an American. Our system of church-state separation means that individuals, not school or government officials, get to make their own decisions about religion.
Public schools educate 90% of U.S. students and are an important building block for a diverse, welcoming society. Church-state separation ensures that children of all religions and none feel welcome in their own public school.
Prayer in school
Public schools cannot conduct, sponsor or promote prayer, whether during morning announcements, classes, assemblies, graduations, sporting events, banquets, awards ceremonies or any other official school activities. School employees cannot lead prayers, invite a parent or clergyperson to do so, or appoint or encourage students to pray or lead prayers.
Students may pray silently during the school day if it does not interfere with classes or the smooth running of the school. Interrupting the teacher or disrupting the class with loud prayers is not allowed.
Students do not have the right to harass other students with unwanted religious proselytizing, including unwanted religious discussions with them, badgering them to engage in religious activity or pressing religious materials on them.
Religious displays
Neither the school nor its employees are allowed to put up religious displays, like crosses, Bible verses, the Ten Commandments or pictures of religious figures. This includes in the classroom. For teachers, you are a government employee, and the things that you choose to display in your classroom represent information that the government wants students to learn. Displays are not your private speech, even when they are on your desk or the walls or bulletin board of your classroom.
The only time when a religious display may be permissible is if teachers have created a place where students can display their work. If a teacher treats all students’ work equally and some of the students’ work contains religious content, then they ordinarily would not be violating the separation of church and state by permitting display of the work. But they should take care not to treat students’ religious work or expression more favorably than other types of speech.
Religious curriculum content
Public schools may teach factual information about religion, including in a history class the role of religion in the settlement of the American colonies, or teaching in a geography or social studies class the main religious groups in a part of the world. Nor is it coercion to have to learn facts about a religion.
Schools may cover how America’s founders dealt with the idea of a state-established religion – they rejected it – and the debates over religion that have taken place since. Schools may even use some religious materials, like the Bible, as part of literary and historic instruction if the material is presented objectively and does not attempt to introduce religious teachings. For example, using the Bible in English class to help explain certain biblical allegories in a book or story is fine.
But public schools must not teach that a particular religion is true (or false), or that religious doctrines or beliefs are factual. For instance, a school could not legally tell students that God helped Moses part the Red Sea, that Jesus was resurrected or that Mohammed was visited by an angel. Nor may they encourage students to practice a particular religion or participate in a religious ritual. Public schools are not allowed to teach creationism or intelligent design, because those ideas are fundamentally religious explanations for the beginning of life.
The same rules apply to assemblies, school plays and field trips. Music classes generally also follow the same rules. Religious songs may be included in a school choir program, but only if (1) they have instructional value for a particular musical idea or skill, (2) the performance as a whole is not dominated by religious songs and (3) students are allowed to opt out of singing religious songs without penalty.