Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 6, 1993 TAG: 9301060262
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
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.There you have the public debate at Tuesday night's Montgomery County School Board meeting over dropping religious names for school holidays.
Some even brought elements of preaching into the discussion.
"This is a conspiracy toward God, hallelujah, " said Rev. Jack Sacco, a supporter of religious holiday names. "Two thousand years ago when little Jesus came to be born they didn't have room for him then and they don't have room for him now."
Basically, the debate at Tuesday night's meeting boiled down to two different interpretations of the U.S. Constitution on the role of religion in government and vice versa - setting emotional arguments aside.
About 900 people showed up for the meeting in the Christiansburg High School auditorium. Law officers were evident, but the crowd was generally well-behaved except for 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 afterward.
"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.
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.
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.
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, they said.
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.
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."
Although the renaming of school holidays has just recently 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 be Christians.
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