It shall be unlawful for any public secondary school which receives Federal financial assistance and which has a limited open forum to deny equal access or a fair opportunity to, or discriminate against, any students who wish to conduct a meeting within that limited forum on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other content of the speech at such meetings.
$14 paid each semester by the students is not a general tax designed to raise revenue for the University ....[T]he money goes to a special fund from which any group of students with CIO status can draw for purposes consistent with the University's educational mission; and to the extent the student is interested in speech, withdrawal is permitted to cover the whole spectrum of speech, whether it manifests a religious view, an antireligious view, or neither. Our decision, then, cannot be read as addressing an expenditure from a general tax fund. *1086 Here, the disbursements from the fund go to private contractors for the cost of printing that which is protected under the Speech Clause of the First Amendment. This is a far cry from a general public assessment designed to provide financial support for a church.
[T]here is a crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect. We think that secondary school students are mature enough and are likely to understand that a school does not endorse or support student speech that it merely permits on a nondiscriminatory basis.
Students who did not choose to take the religious instruction were not released from public school duties; they were required to leave their classrooms and go to some other place in the school building for pursuit of their secular studies. On the other hand, students who were released from secular study for the religious instructions were required to be present at the religious classes. Reports of their presence or absence were to be made to their secular teachers.
Pupils compelled by law to go to school for secular education are released in part from their legal duty upon the condition that they attend the religious classes. This is beyond all question a utilization of the tax-established and tax-supported public school system to aid religious groups to spread their faith.
Here not only are the State's tax supported public school buildings used for the dissemination of religious doctrines. The State also affords sectarian groups an invaluable aid in that it helps to provide pupils for their religious classes through use of the State's compulsory public school machinery. This is not separation of Church and State.
At [the school], classroom instruction begins at 7:25 a.m. and ends at 11:30 a.m.; it resumes at 12:15 p.m. and continues until 2:10 p.m. The parties specifically stipulated that no classroom instruction occurs during the school's lunch hour. In fact, students are not even required to remain on campus during this time.
The only timing issue with which the Court concerned itself in Mergens is the Act's restriction of meetings to “noninstructional time.” The Court found this limitation significant because it avoids the problems of mandatory attendance requirements, which the Court had previously struck down. Since the lunchtime meetings proposed by Ceniceros would resemble in every significant respect the[after school] meetings approved by the Court in Mergens, permitting Ceniceros' group to meet during lunchtime would not violate the Establishment Clause.
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