Education: A Victory for Christian Schools

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Basics and the Bible are freed from state control

It is 8:30 a.m. on a wintry Michigan day. In a classroom decorated with a large Scripture verse and accordion-pleated angels sit 27 third-and fourth-graders. The mood is quiet and serious. Lessons start with the Pledge of Allegiance, then a stanza of America. The students pray aloud for relatives; they thank God for Bobby's new glasses. For 45 minutes, their teacher, Joel Allen, 28, leads the students through Bible study. "Who made you?" he asks. "God made me. Job 33:4, "the children answer. During the course of the 6½hour day at the Bridgeport Baptist Academy, the students, ages four to 18, are drilled in the basics and the Bible. Says Allen: "We don't consider it a job working here. We consider it a ministry."

The independence of that ministry was resoundingly upheld last week. In a strong, unambiguous decision, a Michigan judge reaffirmed the First Amendment guarantee of separation of church and state by exempting private Christian schools from state supervision of their curriculum and teachers. Ministers, teachers and parents of the Bridgeport Baptist Academy and the Sheridan Road Christian School, both near Saginaw, had charged that attempts by the state's board of education to supervise curriculum and teacher qualifications violated their religious freedom. Judge Ray Hotchkiss agreed, ruling that the board, by imposing its secular standards of education on religious schooling, "interfered with plaintiffs' constitutional right to freely exercise their religion." Said Hotchkiss: "This court fails to see a compelling state interest in requiring nonpublic schools to be of the 'same standard' as public schools in the same district. Such a scheme does not ensure even a minimum degree of quality of education." Hotchkiss, however, did uphold the state's right to impose on the Christian schools health and safety requirements, to which they had never objected.

The fundamentalists were jubilant at their victory. Said Sheridan Road Principal Bill Swain: "We knew our position was strongly supported by the Bible. We thought we had the Constitution on our side. But I didn't expect to get a favorable decision." William Bentley Ball, a leading constitutional lawyer who argued for the two schools, called the judgment "very strong on religious liberty, clarifying the right to teach and the right to learn."