Citing legal concerns, two Florida districts vote against allowing school chaplains
The Osceola and Marion County school boards will not have Christian chaplains in their buildings, relying instead on trained professionals
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Two large public school districts in Florida have rejected Christian chaplains working in the their buildings despite a Republican-backed law giving them the option to do it.
Earlier this year, Florida passed a bill allowing untrained Christian chaplains to volunteer in public schools, essentially as substitutes for trained social workers and counselors.
There were some caveats to HB 931. Parents had to be informed about the religious affiliations of those chaplains. They had to give permission before their children could see them. All potential chaplains also had to pass a background check. All that’s fine, but it’s the bare minimum.
We always knew what this would look like in practice.
If a school district approved that kind of program because the state told them it was legal, there would be a line of Christian chaplains out the door just waiting to get the green light. And anyone could be a chaplain! There are no special credentials they need to prove they’re up to the task of helping kids! If they had the blessing, so to speak, of a local church, they would be good to go. (And you could easily expect some pastors would hand out “certificates of chaplaincy” to anyone who wanted them much like they did with COVID vaccine exemption notes.) Simply put, there would be nothing stopping those adults from using public schools as target practice for conversions. All they needed was permission from parents, and they could do whatever it took to lure kids to Jesus.
That would be a huge problem for students who weren’t Christian (even if their parents were) and for LGBTQ students whose parents thought seeing a Christian chaplain could fix that.
After the bill was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the ball was in the court of individual school districts. Would they choose to allow chaplains into their schools or would they rely on people who actually knew what they were doing?
That was a question facing the Osceola County School Board back in August. DeSantis literally signed the chaplain bill at a high school in Osceola County and Superintendent Mark Shanoff said to him during the April event, "It's an honor that you have chosen our community for today's signing ceremony." Yet the same school district was second-guessing whether this was a good idea because The Satanic Temple was eager to get involved.
They had every right to do it considering the IRS recognizes them as a religious group. And if the school board allowed chaplains into their buildings, but rejected Satanists, they could expect to see litigation. (DeSantis was asked about this very possibility when he signed the law and he said of the Satanists, “That is not a religion. That is not qualifying to be able to participate in this.”)
But the Osceola Board didn’t want to take his word on that, so they kept delaying the vote.
In order to clear up any concerns, Florida officials released a “model policy” for school boards in August. That policy, however, appeared to exclude certain groups (like Satanists) because it defined “chaplain” as an “individual who is officially authorized by the leadership of a religion under the religion’s governing principles to conduct religious exercises.” (That’s a very specific rule that would exclude many minority religious groups.)
It also required all chaplains to have a graduate degree in counseling or theology and have two years of experience—both of which favor the sort of people who attended Christian seminaries and exclude minorities that don’t have that kind of infrastructure in place. The policy also gave principals the ability to reject volunteers if they felt those individuals would go against the “pedagogical interests of the school”—basically veto power over certain unwanted people.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State said that model policy was “misguided and unconstitutional.”
… The model policy would exclude some minority faiths or Humanists for example – even some Christian traditions like Baptists, Quakers and non-denominational congregations could be left out. And it requires school principals to determine if someone who applies to be a school chaplain is a member of a state-sanctioned faith. Principals must decide if the chaplain’s religion is led by a “hierarchy,” “worships a supernatural entity” and “imposes moral duties.”
Telling principals they need to wade into theology to parse a faith tradition’s beliefs about the nature and existence of God, moral codes and governance structure is not just unfair and unwise – it’s unconstitutional.
With all that in mind, when the Board met in August, they had to listen to a number of critics, including Christians and church/state separation proponents and even The Satanic Temple’s co-founder Lucien Greaves, who told them if they allowed Christian chaplains in their buildings, “You will end up with Satanist chaplains. Vote how you will.”
At the end of those public comments, the Board voted 3-2 against bringing chaplains into their schools… but it was just temporary. They said a committee would look at the suggested policy, make suggestions in order to avoid legal conflict, and then reconsider. One of the ideas included adding a waiver to the permission slip. Parents would have to release the district “from liability for any and all actions of the School Chaplain.”
Ominous!
This week, after months of meetings and debates, the Osceola County School Board as well as the Marion County School Board made their final decisions on the matter.
In Osceola County, the board was considering several pages of new rules… with the chaplain option left off the list. They voted unanimously to approve the chaplain-less rule package, despite a former board member urging them to reconsider.
[Jon] Arguello was back Tuesday, as an audience member, to again speak in favor of the plan.
“It’s clear the community wants this, so it’s clear you resist what the community wants,” he directed toward the dais he sat on for the last four years. “This program is necessary. God is not a lie.
“You will harm our students by denying this. Here is something good for our population, and you deny it.”
…
That was part of the concern Board Member Terry Castillo, who made the motion to accept the new policies in this round of additions and modifications, without adopting the chaplain plan.
“This opens our district up to potential financial risk, and I don’t want to take on risk,” she said. “Students still have the ability to express their faith; that’s still protected. I worry there will be a challenge to the (state) law as it is written.”
While many Christians spoke in favor of the proselytizing policy, there were sensible voices in the mix on Tuesday, including Jocelyn Williamson, co-founder of the Central Florida Freethought Community, who pointed out that, in the case of LGBTQ students, the proposed policy could allow a chaplain’s “religious convictions to invalidate a student’s lived reality, regardless of intent.”
David Williamson, the CFFC’s other co-founder, told me this victory only came after “6 meetings and 4 votes.” There was enormous pressure to allow chaplains in the schools but the board was rightly worried about the potential legal concerns… and perhaps the actual fears of what religious chaplains would do once they were given access to kids.
It was a somewhat different story for the Marion County School Board, where the public pressure to allow chaplains in the buildings wasn’t nearly as fierce. Williamson told me that over the course of three board meetings, no one spoke in favor of the plan.
When the chaplain policy came up again on Tuesday, it was people like Williamson who spoke out against it: “You can either have an unconstitutional chaplain policy that discriminates based on religious viewpoint, or you can have a constitutional policy that exposes you to serious legal liability.”
After a brief discussion among board members, the final vote was 2-2 to adopt the chaplain policy… which meant there wasn’t a majority, so the motion failed. Victory! (The fifth board member, who happens to be a reverend, was not present at the meeting.)
All of this is a huge victory for Satanists, secularists, church/state separation advocates, and people who actually give a damn about children.
Students in these districts won’t have to defend themselves from predatory Christians who see them as targets. Instead, if they need help, they can rely on the trained professionals who take their jobs seriously.
If the board wants to help those students, they can always hire more counselors and social workers. Or urge residents to demand that lawmakers fund those positions instead of wasting their time and money on shoving religion into schools.
David Williamson told me last night that he believes this rejection of chaplains is spreading:
Already eight Florida counties have rejected the idea of chaplains—that we know of; Hardee, Hernando, Osceola, Marion, Charlotte, Duval, and Putnam. Some of these are rural, red, religious counties. Miami-Dade hasn't done anything since they talked about it in the spring.
Presumably, these school boards are discovering what we and their school board attorneys already know: that you can't have a chaplain program without both discriminating against applicants and violating students rights under the Establishment Clause.
Whenever a school board says yes, it probably won’t be long before the first chaplain-related lawsuit is filed.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
[God is not a lie.]
Debatable. But once again, if God is real, They doesn't need the State to 'help' Them reach people.
This is a God who supposedly spoke the universe into existence, who did the ten plagues, who resurrected dead people, who came back from the dead themselves.
Surely, this same God can reach the hearts of a child or teen in need and encourage them without the school board's help, right?
Where is your faith, Christian?
Their concerns centered around potential legal problems, and not what could result of giving untrained 'chaplains' access to kids. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Likewise, conservative Christians see their religion as the answer to every problem, the actual history be damned.