Thursday October 18, 2001
Pull Over!-The One Gift We All Can Give to Emergency Workers
A friend of mine, Marcus Harton, a Peabody Award winning photojournalist who now is with the Newseum In DC had a great idea. Marcus suggests that you hook this new reverence for firefighters and emergency workers to something that people could really do to be nice to them.
Here is Marcus’ pitch: “One of the strongest memories from the ride-alongs I took with firefighters and police is just how awful civilian drivers are when it comes to getting out of the way when the emergency vehicles are using their lights and sirens. I wonder if our bolstered veneration of emergency responders is translating into any improvement in our inclination to yield the right of way. Great idea Marcus and thanks for thinking of Morning Meeting readers!
Here are some resources for you to use to flesh this one out:
-Emergency traffic-what to do
–A review of 1997 statistics by the Auto Club of Southern California found that, in California alone, emergency vehicles were involved in 21 fatal and 1,839 injury traffic collisions. Motorists were at fault in 75 percent of fatal collisions and 63 percent of injury collisions.
–Advice from cops: The largest fear of operating an emergency vehicle is the unknown actions of other motorists on the roadway. If a motorist does nothing more than stop in the roadway as soon as they are aware of an approaching emergency vehicle, the guesswork of the emergency vehicle operator is eliminated. They can always maneuver around you if you will simply stop. If the emergency vehicle operator has to follow a motorist who slows but does not yield to the right or stop, that operator cannot be sure you have recognized the emergency vehicle or that you will not move suddenly to the right or left as the emergency vehicle attempts to pass.
4th Graders Strip Searched
Did you see this? Do schools have a policy about such things?
School Prayer After the Attacks
I have been interested in how schools appear, in the days after the attacks, to have loosened their prayer restrictions.
Education Week reported, “While most such activity went mostly unquestioned in the immediate days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in more recent weeks there have been eyebrows raised in some communities about the propriety—and constitutionality—of some practices. Some civil libertarians have quietly suggested that not every patriotic or religious response to the attacks in schools is the right, or legally sound, approach.”
“I think that because public schools serve all children, it would be best if that kind of sentiment were not placed on the bulletin board or on marquees that advertise school wrestling matches and so forth,” said Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, based in Washington. He noted that after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was an increase in reports of public schools allowing group prayers or inviting clergy members to assemblies. School administrators need to be mindful of activities that might violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against a government establishment of religion, Mr. Lynn said. “The Constitution has not been suspended in the midst of this national tragedy,” he said.
In Tucson, Ariz., some parents objected to a sign that said simply, “Bless America.” Who was blessing America, one parent asked school officials, if not God? After consulting with its lawyer, the Tucson district allowed God back on the theory that the slogan was primarily a patriotic message, not a religious one.
The American Civil Liberties Union argues, “Any program of religious indoctrination, direct or indirect, in the public schools or by use of public resources is a violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state and must be opposed.” The ACLU says that religion liberty can flourish only when the government leaves religion alone.
WLWT-TV Cincinnati reported, “Can children pray in the public schools? The answer to that question, according to the United States Department of Education, is yes, within certain limits. The Department issued guidelines on religious expression in the public schools in 1998, and those guidelines remain in effect today.
The guidelines include:
-Students in informal settings, such as cafeterias and hallways, may pray and discuss their religious views with each other, subject to the same rules of order as apply to other student activities and speech.
– Students may also speak to, and attempt to persuade, their peers about religious topics just as they do with regard to political topics.
-School officials, however, should intercede to stop student speech that constitutes harassment aimed at a student or a group of students.
-Students may also participate in before- or after-school events with religious content, such as “see you at the flag pole” gatherings, on the same terms as they may participate in other noncurriculum activities on school premises.
-School officials may neither discourage nor encourage participation in such an event.
24 States Have Mandatory Pledge Laws-are They Legal?
Years ago, as a reporter, I remember watching a young immigrant girl stand silently in her 3rd grade classroom as her classmates said the Pledge of Allegiance. I remember thinking how lonely and left out she looked, the only one not saying the pledge.
24 states have laws requiring the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
-Wisconsin just passed such a law.
–Virginia’s new law.
Education Week says, “Most school administrators are probably aware that a 1943 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court prohibits mandatory recitation of the pledge. Generations ago, children who failed to salute were sometimes ostracized and publicly harassed. In the 1943 case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jehovah’s Witnesses and against West Virginia, where children had been expelled for failing to salute the flag:
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion,” says the World War II-era opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. (Note from Al-do yourself a favor and read this opinion-it is stirring prose.)
The state laws generally require students who do not want to recite the pledge to stand and be silent or otherwise refrain from disrupting the class.
Elliot M. Mincberg, the legal director of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, based in Washington, said schools must ensure that “students can opt out of the pledge in ways that don’t stigmatize them.”
The Supreme Court has not ruled on state laws requiring schools to include the pledge as part of their routines, but a federal appeals court issued an oft-cited ruling in 1992 upholding an Illinois law that does that. While acknowledging the potential pressure on students to recite the pledge, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, in Chicago, held in Sherman v. Community Consolidated School District that “patriotism is an effort by the state to promote its own survival, and along the way to teach those virtues that justify its survival. Public schools help to transmit those virtues and values.”
