Elkhorn City Elementary School in Elkhorn City, Ky., will no longer allow organized prayer or display religious advertisements or fliers within the school building.
The principal of Elkhorn City Elementary School and Pike County Schools Superintendent Roger Wagner took this action as a result of a letter Wagner received from the Freedom From Religion Foundation on July 31.
FFRF Senior Staff Attorney Rebecca Markert wrote to Wagner after a concerned parent told FFRF that his five-year-old daughter's teacher had been instructing her students to pray. His daughter had told him she had been praying every day before lunch for the past two years. The worried parent also told FFRF that the school had posted Christian and church event fliers. Markert wrote that the school should educate the teacher “about why public school authorities may not abuse positions of trust to proselytize four-year-olds or any students.”
Wagner and the principal each responded to FFRF in Nov. 1 and Oct. 30 letters, respectively, affirming that organized prayer and religion-endorsing fliers in the schools had ended.