Howell Public School reject attempted assault on the separation of church and state

Cooler heads prevailed at Howell Public Schools after a lack of interest in establishing an elective course that will study the Bible in a literary context and as history died because of a lack of support.

North Carolina-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools - an affiliate of The American Family Association, the most well-known anti-gay hate group in America – would have provided the curriculum after a parent proposed the high school adopt the course. The group claims the “program is concerned with education rather than indoctrination,” but its website also says it want to return the Bible to public schools in a backdoor assault on the 1st Amendment’s separation of church and state.

The district issued a press release Monday that said the course would not be established at the high school because none of the high school’s social studies teachers volunteered to bring the curriculum to a K12 departmental committee meeting. To get the ball rolling on new curriculum and new courses, a recommendation first had to come from a curriculum content area to go on to the District Curriculum Council for adoption. There was no interest in doing that. However, the issue is not completely dead, and Jeanne Farina, Associate Superintendent of Curriculum, said the curriculum is scheduled to be a topic for discussion during the next scheduled meeting of the social studies faculty in April.

A couple of groups did step up to the plate to defend against the assault on the Constitution, and they included the Michigan Atheists and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Even though the press release was issued Monday afternoon before the School Board meeting later that evening, meaning it was a dead issue until at least the spring, sources at the meeting said the school board’s resident rightwing extremist, Wendy Day, made a motion to approve the course. Luckily, her motion died for a lack of support, and it did not even reach a vote by the full board.

Day, who says Evolution is a theory, was just elected to the board last spring. She is a founding member of an anti-gay hate group called the LOVE (Livingston Organization for Values in Education) PAC that sprang up last spring in response to a diversity flag they mistakenly claim is a gay pride flag that promotes and endorses homosexuality. The so-called “LOVE group claims it wants to bring traditional values back to the schools, but traditional values are all too often are simply code words for intolerance, discrimination and fear. That appears to the case here in Livingston County as well.