Equal Access

More than 2 million U.S. students pray together each September at public schools across the country during the annual See You at the Pole day, according to the National Network of Youth Ministries.

See You at the Pole began in 1990, but if I remember correctly, maybe a dozen students met semi-regularly to pray at my Tampa-area high school's flagpole in the late '80s.

Tolerated by all though they were, Chrisitian students elsewhere who wanted to gather freely before school hours on campus to pray needed Clinton's education secretary to write "American educators" a note reminding them about their students' basic civil liberties and the Equal Access Act. How far from the margins of public life expressions of faith have come, and for the better of us all.

The act simply and clearly states that public secondary schools that allow one non-curricular group to meet at school during non-instructional time cannot "deny equal access or a fair opportunity to, or discriminate against, any students who wish to conduct a meeting [at school] on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other content of the speech at such meetings."

The Equal Access Act, therefore, protects not only the rights of the religious, but those of whom the religious too often are less tolerant, such as Okeechobee, Florida 's Yasmin Gonzalez. Gonzalez, a 17-year old public high school senior in "a town of about 5,500 residents and around 60 churches", began a Gay-Straight Alliance for students that her principal and school board will not allow to meet at school.

According to schools superintendent Barbara Cooper, ''My position was then and remains that we are an abstinence-only district, that our clubs are primarily dealing with curriculum or curriculum-related clubs and organizations and we would decline the request . . . . We are an abstinence-only district and it's abstinence from any kind of sexual behavior, whether it's heterosexual or bisexual or homosexual, whatever it is.''

Cooper betrays not only a fundamental misunderstanding of Gay-Straight Alliances and, of course, the law, but also her curriculum.