Public Schools: How Do You Prohibit Prayer?

When public schools open next month, a large number of them will be operating in clear-cut defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite all the furor over the court’s decisions banning school prayer and Bible reading as an infringement of the Constitution, most schools that permitted it in the past are acting as if the court had never spoken. Edicts against prayer and Scripture are proving almost as unenforceable as Prohibition.

The defiance is most common in the South. North Carolina’s Charles F. Car roll, state superintendent of public instruction, says flatly: “We’ve had these practices since the beginning—I don’t know of any school that has ruled out prayers and Bible reading.” Mississippi Superintendent of Education J. M. Tubb says: “The ruling hasn’t really changed things much.” Some Mississippi schools have students recite the Lord’s Prayer, others let students propose their own. In the Greenville schools, a verse of Scripture is read over loudspeaker systems each day.

Teacher’s Choice. Top officials in Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, where state laws had long required Bible reading in the schools, simply assume that the state laws still prevail. In Alabama, each teacher must read Scripture to pupils regularly or risk the loss of state funds to the school—and Proxy Governor George Wallace sees a sure-fire political plus for him in a fight with anyone who wants to challenge that custom. A Vanderbilt professor surveyed Tennessee’s school districts, found that the only change some had made was to let each teacher decide whether or not to read the Bible, and give students a right to step momentarily out of the classroom. In Georgia, Associate Superintendent H. Titus Singletary concedes that most schools in his state have prayer, if only in the form of silent meditation.

Defiance is also widespread in rural Bible belt areas of the Midwest. One sur vey, for example, indicates that more than half of the school districts in In diana observe periods of prayer and one-third continue Bible reading. When some parents of children in a Jennison, Mich., school objected to classroom prayer, the school board rejected their complaints. In the Southwest, one count shows that Bible readings were held in 79.9% of the Texas secondary schools, prayers were said in 89.5%. In the East, where 68% of the schools had Bible reading and prayer in 1962, most have abandoned the practice. Scripture and prayer have never been common in Western schools.

No Involvement. The violations continue largely because of a legal stalemate. While the Supreme Court rulings seem clear enough, a violation of the constitutional principle of church-state separation is not a criminal act, and the Justice Department will not move until some aggrieved party files a civil suit contending that specific school officials are acting unconstitutionally. Until that happens, says a Justice Department spokesman with obvious relief, “we have no type of involvement.” Such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League find it too costly to support plaintiffs who wish to take individual teachers to court—and the impasse suits the Johnson Administration just fine. Next year’s election poses enough problems for L.B.J. without sending federal lawyers after every school teacher who permits his children to pray.