Tri-State Freethinkers have been busy monitoring local school districts for violations of separation of church and state. Two letter writing campaigns recently came back with positive results:
Boone County School District: Social Media
Tri-State Freethinkers were alerted by a concerned parent a few weeks ago to a troubling post on the Boone County School District Twitter account which had retweeted a post from famed mega church preacher and televangelist, Joel Osteen. The quote stated “God is not going to stop every difficulty, but He will give you the strength, the power, the grace to go through it. #NightofHope”. A letter was written explaining the violation and citing relevant case law addressed to the Superintendent of Schools, Randy Poe Ed.D. Tri-State Freethinkers received a timely written response from his office explaining that the post was “inadvertently and mistakenly retweeted” from the Superintendent’s personal account to the official Boone County School site and was not authorized by the Superintendent himself.
This is not the first time Tri-State Freethinkers have written Boone County Schools. In 2015, TSF wrote a letter to the principal of Longbranch Elementary School on behalf of a concerned parent including photos taken of a teacher’s classroom which contained items promoting prayer and God. The principal had the items removed quickly.
Youngstown City Schools: Intelligent Design in Biology
Tri-State Freethinkers became aware of an Ohio School District including Intelligent Design in the classroom via an Arstechnica article which linked to a document found on the school’s server. The document was a biology lesson plan laced with stereotypical Intelligent Design “teach the controversy” propaganda.
Initially, Tri-State Freethinkers wrote to the interim superintendent of schools, Mr. Stephen A Stohla. After monitoring the Board of Education meeting minutes, it was discovered that an attempt by one of the board members to address the issue was overwhelmingly shot down by other board members whose background was heavily religious. TSF then decided to write additional letters to each board member individually, outlining the legality of teaching intelligent design in the public classroom and asking for its removal. School Board Member Dario Hunter additionally wrote to the ACLU who investigated and followed up on the violation.
We received wonderful news a few days ago from the local newspaper The Vindicator, with an article titled: “CEO directs removal of creationism from Youngstown science curriculum”. Mr. Hunter spoke out against the incident:
“He believes his attempts to get the creationism references removed were rejected by the majority of school board members because some school board members are motivated by their own agendas and personal interests rather than what’s best for the district’s students and their education.”
Tri-State Freethinkers encourage all parents and community members to be vigilant in observing their local public schools and government meetings for violations of the separation of church and state and contact us immediately tsfreethinkers@gmail.com.
