A first-grade girl in North Carolina had the word “God” stripped from a poem she wrote and was going to read at her school’s Veterans Day assembly earlier this month, NewsBuster’s Noel Sheppard reports.
The offending line? It talked about the girl’s two grandfathers who served during the Vietnam War.
“He prayed to God for peace,” she wrote of one of them. “He prayed to God for strength.”
Unfortunately, Sheppard notes, a parent found out about this, and complained to the school district.
School Board member Lynn Greene told McDowell News, “My understanding on the law is a teacher cannot promote any certain religion, but when it comes to students voicing their opinion or expressing themselves in a poem we pretty much have to give some leeway. To me this whole thing is a violation of that child’s rights. Nobody forced her to write the poem, that was her part of the program. She was asked to write a poem about veterans and she did. My personal opinion is that her rights were violated.”
After fully examining the issue during the BOE meeting, President and Chief Executive Officer Ken Paulson stated the school did in fact have the right to remove the word “God” from the child’s poem.
“Courts have consistently held up the rights for students to express themselves unless their speech is disruptive to the school,” stated Paulson according to McDowell News. “When the little girl wrote the poem and included a reference to God she had every right to do that. The First Amendment protects all Americans. She had every right to mention God, (but) that dynamic changed when they asked her to read it at an assembly.”
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