Students at El Capitan High School in Colorado City, Ariz., are protesting school-sponsored prayer that district officials are still scheduling in the graduation ceremony despite student objections and constitutional dictates.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has told the Colorado City Unified School District to immediately remove prayer from the school’s May 15 graduation ceremony after the school received complaints from graduating seniors who say administrators are attempting to force religion into what should be a celebration of students’ achievements. According to the student complaint received by FFRF, El Capitan High School has long included official invocations and benedictions at graduation ceremonies, with students selected in advance to lead the audience in prayer. This year’s graduation program was set to feature scheduled prayers led by two designated students despite clear Supreme Court precedent ruling such practices unconstitutional.
After student objections, district officials reportedly altered the program so that the prayer would occur before the ceremony officially begins and described participation as “optional.” But the change misses the point.
“El Capitan High School’s custom and practice of including school-sponsored prayers at graduation directly violates students’ First Amendment rights,” FFRF Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence writes. “The school cannot avoid a constitutional violation by assigning students to lead prayers, moving the prayer to the top of the ceremony, or proclaiming that the prayer is no longer mandatory.”
As the school board itself has noted, the ceremony is under the school’s control. A public school cannot constitutionally implement religious worship as part of a school activity.
High school graduation is a once-in-a-lifetime event that students spend over a decade working toward. As FFRF’s student-complainant explained, the school forcing prayer on graduating students has caused the students “frustration” instead of allowing them to focus on their achievements. Including prayer at graduation puts many students and families in the unconscionable and unconstitutional position of choosing between exiting or foregoing the ceremony or else violating their conscience.
Plus, having prayer at graduation ceremonies and other school-sponsored events needlessly marginalizes students and families who are nonreligious or members of minority faiths. As many as 29 percent of Americans are non-Christian, including the almost 36 percent that are nonreligious. (Arizona even has slightly higher than average numbers of religiously unaffiliated adults at 31 percent.) More than half of Generation Z members (those born after 1996) are non-Christian, including 43 percent who are nonreligious.
“Students deserve to celebrate their achievements that came from hard work — not be forced to show obeisance to someone else’s religion,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “We expect this rogue school district to stop violating the constitutional rights of its students by canceling these prayers immediately.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 41,000 members and several chapters across the country, including more than 1,000 members and a chapter in Arizona. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
