FortBendNow.com

District 26 State Rep. Charlie Howard believes students have the right to “individual religious expression” in public schools, and has introduced a bill spelling out that right in detail.

“It is a win-win for students and school officials alike, both of whom are now uncertain how to navigate what has become muddied constitutional waters,” Howard said. “Teachers will now be able to rest easy knowing that they are both protected and bound by law in allowing students of all faiths constitutionally guaranteed religious speech.”

House Bill 3678, “relating to voluntary student-initiated expression of religious viewpoints in public schools,” would write into Texas law that school districts “treat student expression of religious viewpoints in the same manner as the district treats student expression of secular or other viewpoints, without discrimination.”

To assure there’s no discrimination against students’ religious viewpoints, and to assure there’s no perception that a school district ascribes to any particular point of view, Howard’s bill also calls on school districts to “establish a limited public forum for student speakers at school events in which students are to publicly speak.”

According to Howard’s bill, in setting up such forums each school district must:

→ “Provide the limited public forums in a manner that do not discriminate against a student’s voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint (if any) on otherwise permissible subjects/topics;”

→ “Provide a method, based on neutral criteria, for selection of student speakers for school events and for granduations;”

→ “Provide that a student speaker may not engage in obscene, vulgar, offensively lewd or indecent speech;”

→ “State that the student’s speech does not reflect the endorsement, sponsorship, position or expression of the school district, and continue to do so for as long as there is a need to dispel confusion over the non-sponsorship of the student’s speech.”

School districts would be required to implement a local policy over structure of the public forums and other provisions of the bill, and could voluntarily adopt a “model policy” that automatically would bring them into compliance with Howard’s bill.

Under that model policy, certain students would be given the opportunity to “introduce school events such as sports events, assemblies, opening announcements/greetings for the school day, pep rallies” and other events.

But under the policy, only students in the “highest two grade levels” in a particular school would be eligible to speak at the public forums, unless they also hold “positions of honor” such as being student council officers, class officers or “captains of the football team, and other students holding positions of honor as the district may dictate.”

The bill spells out students’ rights to organize prayer groups and religious clubs, and to meet before, during and after school “to the same extend that students are permitted to organize other non-curricular student activities and groups.”

Howard’s bill also specifically states that students “may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions.”

Thus, the bill says, “If a teacher’s assignment involves writing a poem, the work of a stuudent who submits a poem in the form of a prayer (for example, a psalm) should be judged on the basis of academic standards (such as literary quality) and neither penalized nor rewarded on account of itts religious content.”