Friday, August 08, 2014

Buying Parochial Schools on the Cheap

Liberal Plantation                       


De Blasio’s Prekindergarten Expansion Collides With Church-State Divide                                                      

 
[...] The biblical story of Noah’s Ark will be taught, without mention of who told Noah to build it. Challah, the Jewish bread eaten on the Sabbath, will be baked, but no blessings said over it. Some crucifixes will be removed, but others left hanging.

These are the kinds of church-state gymnastics that New York City and some religious schools are performing as Mayor Bill de Blasio expands government-funded prekindergarten. Because of inadequate public school capacity, the de Blasio administration has been urging religious schools and community organizations to consider hosting the added programs.

But the push is raising fresh questions for civil libertarians concerned about church-state issues, and for the schools themselves, which want to help the city and qualify for its roughly $10,000-per-student tuition payments while preserving some of the faith-based elements that attract their main clientele.

The city is now asking those schools to consider converting their government-subsidized programs to a full day, or six hours 20 minutes, of secular instruction. Richard R. Buery Jr., the deputy mayor in charge of the prekindergarten expansion, said the shift was part of the mayor’s push “to create a single, unified, high-quality system.
The concerns crystallized in a one-page document the city issued in May to religious schools weighing whether to host full-day prekindergarten classes. Rather than state simply, as other municipalities have, that all religious instruction is prohibited, the city’s guidelines say that religious texts may be taught if they are “presented objectively as part of a secular program of instruction.” Learning about one’s culture is permitted, city officials say, but religious instruction is not.

[....]

Religious symbols are not permitted in areas used by city-funded prekindergarten students. A mezuza on a doorway would generally be allowed, but if it had a Jewish star on the outside, it would have to be evaluated in context: If it was small, it would probably be fine, said Maya Wiley, the counsel to the mayor who helped develop the guidelines.

City officials point out that there is nothing new about religious organizations’ housing publicly funded prekindergarten programs; Catholic schools and other faith-based organizations already host half-day versions. But those programs present fewer potential legal problems, because the schools can deliver secular education during one half of the day and religious instruction during the other, when parents, not the city, are paying.

The city is now asking those schools to consider converting their government-subsidized programs to a full day, or six hours 20 minutes, of secular instruction. Richard R. Buery Jr., the deputy mayor in charge of the prekindergarten expansion, said the shift was part of the mayor’s push “to create a single, unified, high-quality system.” [Full]


 Bishop of Statist Church of St. Marx, de Blasio,  sees a Honey Trap  opportunity ... 







3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not sure about the point. Fact is the "ark" was round (Babylonian texts describe it in great detail but don't mention Noah). The ark-builder in the Babylonian tablet was a Sumerian king named Atram-Hasis. That’s a strange detail to get wrong in an account written in a tablet that was written some 700 years before Genesis was written.
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iri said...

The ark in question looked exactly as described in Genesis. It was not round.

Every ancient civilization has a flood story. I don't wonder why either.

Anonymous said...

I blame global warming!

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