A lawyer for the Freedom From Religion Foundation contacted a Missouri school district after watching a video that purportedly shows a ministry official leading students in prayer in the lunchroom.

The organization, which describes itself as a watchdog that strives for a separation of church and state, wrote a letter to the Hollister R-V School District’s superintendent, saying a concerned parent contacted them after the video was shared on social media.

The 10-second cell-phone video was uploaded to Facebook on February 5. It appears to show Robert Bruce, the local chapter director of the Christian youth ministry K-Life, standing in the center of a circle of students in the Hollister Middle School lunchroom and leading a prayer. Dozens of students are holding hands in the circle, while a few remain seated at lunch tables.

In his Feb. 10 letter to Hollister’s superintendent, Freedom From Religion Foundation attorney Patrick C. Elliott called the practice “an egregious violation of the First Amendment,” which forbids schools from promoting religion, and said it “must be stopped immediately.”

“It is unconstitutional for a public school to allow an evangelical Christian organization to impose prayer on all students,” Elliott said in a statement. “Giving the group access to all students as part of school programming suggests that the school district has preference not only for religion over nonreligion, but also evangelical Christianity over other faiths. This sort of entanglement between religion and public education is inappropriate.”

The letter argues that allowing the ministry into the school allowed its representatives to “proselytize” and students who did not participate in the prayer were made to feel like outsiders.

According to Elliott’s letter, the child of the parent who complained said that students had been directed in similar prayers on other occasions around the time the video was originally posted.

“No religious organization should have direct access to students at school,” Elliott argues in the letter. “This predatory conduct should raise red flags, especially since these adults are conversing with students without parental knowledge.”

The prayer circle video had been viewed more than 10,000 times as of Thursday afternoon.

In the video’s description on Facebook, the boy who uploaded it to the social media website wrote “we chose to do this” as a way of “Respecting Our God.”

On Thursday, after local media reported on the letter, a student from Hollister High School tweeted that “HHS supports HMS as well as Robert Bruce” and shared a 17-second video of students gathered in a prayer circle in what appears to be the high school’s cafeteria.

The student tweeted that it was a “110% student led prayer,” and the dozens of kids who appear in the high school video all participated voluntarily.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has written many letters to schools and government agencies across the country about the presence of religious tones in those environments.

On Thursday, it announced it had contacted lawyers for the Bentonville School District in Arkansas, claiming that the Feb. 19 inauguration of a new fitness trail at Cooper Elementary School had unconstitutional components, including a nun blessing the trail with holy water.

“Even when outside the typical school environment, the Supreme Court has found prayers taking place at school-sponsored events unconstitutional,” Elliott wrote in the Feb. 23 letter.