Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 6, 1993 TAG: 9301060256
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
SCHOOL BREAKS DEBATED
Imagine a revival meeting with two sides represented, both convinced that theirs was the path of righteousness.Tuesday night's public discussion at the Montgomery County School Board's meeting of the dropping of religious names from school holidays basically boiled down to two different interpretations of the U.S. Constitution - setting emotional arguments aside.
Roughly 900 people showed up for the meeting in the Christiansburg High School auditorium. Law officers were evident, but the crowd was generally well-behaved with the exception of applause and some mild booing and heckling.
After arguments for and against reverting to religious names for school holidays, board Vice Chairman Roy Vickers announced that the School Board would not make a decision on the holiday names until April, when it normally considers the school calendar.
Vickers and other board members said they might hold a public hearing before making a final decision.
"It's a big enough issue that [more] people should have a right to speak," board member Don Lacy of Blacksburg said after the public-address session. "Not everyone was heard; that was the unfortunate thing," added board member Robert Goncz of Christiansburg.
Although 39 people had signed up early to speak at Tuesday night's meeting, the School Board - which had a discussion of next year's budget planned for later in the evening - decided to extend the normal time for public speakers by only 30 minutes, to an hour.
Thirteen people urged the board revert to the traditional Christian names for the holidays. Seven argued that the board had made the right decision in picking secular names in order to be sensitive to non-Christians.
Those who favored changing the names of the school system's "winter" and "spring" holidays back to "Christmas" and "Easter" breaks argued that the Founding Fathers never intended for there to be a separation of church and state in America and that nothing in the Constitution demands it.
"This is still a Christian nation we live in here tonight . . . not a religious nation but a Christian nation," Jim Sutphin told the board.
Sutphin, who was the first to address the board, got much of the crowd to its feet when he asked "all people here tonight, if you believe in a true living God, to stand with us for a moment of prayer."
The Supreme Court has assured "that future generations of Americans will forget God," warned Dale Richmond.
Some said that if the School Board is going to take religion out of the school, it should take out all religions - citing as examples observances of Halloween, a Native American woman who had been teaching elementary pupils Indian ways and the teaching of yoga and transcendental meditation in the school curriculum.
John LeDoux, a former Navy officer and Virginia Tech professor from Blacksburg, said he had fought foreign enemies for 25 years but now found himself fighting enemies at home.
LeDoux is chairman of the Montgomery County chapter of the Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, which helped mobilize opposition among county evangelicals to the secular holiday names.
LeDoux cited cases of the teaching of Native American traditions and meditation in county schools as opening the minds of students to "demonic spirits."
Other speakers warned the board that the country was headed down the road of the Soviet Union, which turned its back on God and whose citizens have since seen the error of their ways.
One, Scott Seitz of Shawsville, brought Saturday's suicide of a Christiansburg Middle School seventh-grader into the debate.
"Our children need the Lord," Seitz said, saying he had stood Monday night before the 12-year-old girl's coffin. Today's children face more problems than when the adults in the crowd were in school, he said.
Speakers who favored leaving the holiday names secular argued that the Constitution is designed to protect the rights of the minority against an oppressive majority and that the nation's founders recognized a danger in state-sponsored religion.
Nancy Alexander of Blacksburg said that as a Christian she applauded the School Board's use of secular holiday names. Religion is a personal and private thing that has no place in the schools, where everyone should feel accepted, she said.
The Rev. Robert Sinclair of Christ Episcopal Church in Blacksburg said the issue is not a matter of what the majority wants. If that were the case, he said, much of the South might still be segregated.
Changing the names back to the Christian names would be a clear case of the civil authorities favoring one religion over another, said Narval Blecher of Blacksburg.
Blecher suggested that supporters of the Christian names had been selectively picking quotes from history to support their arguments. He cited the warning given by James Madison - a Virginian who is recognized as father of the Constitution - when he was confronted with a bill to require the teaching of the Christian religion in school.
Madison warned that the same authority that can establish Christianity over other religions can establish one sect of Christianity over another, Blecher said.
Those who favored reverting to the Christian holiday names got a jump on signing up to speak Tuesday, as they had raised the issue.
On Dec. 14, about 300 county residents stormed a county Board of Supervisors meeting to protest after discovering belatedly that the School Board had changed the names of the "Christmas" and "Easter" holidays to "winter break" and "spring break."
The supervisors, who have no direct control over school policy, responded by unanimously passing a resolution in support of officially naming the holidays "Christmas" and "Easter."
The controversy may be the first indication that some county Christians are ready to fight what they perceive as attacks upon their rights. LeDoux has said the Christian Coalition has other things, such as the school system's family-life curriculum, on its agenda.
Although the renaming of school holidays has just become an issue in Montgomery County, the county's school calendar has referred to "winter break" rather than "Christmas" for five years and to "spring break" rather than "Easter" for at least 10 years.
This past spring, the School Board - at the urging of Board Chairman Daniel Schneck of Christiansburg - changed the holiday names in an employee policy manual to be sensitive to employees who might not follow the Christian religion.
Schneck resigned from the School Board after the supervisors' resolution. He said the board's action was just the latest evidence that he didn't have the support of the supervisors, the people or his School Board colleagues.
Memo: Correction