The annual See You At The Pole event today brought millions of youth around the world together for a time of prayer, praise and petitioning God for the schools’ safety and well-being for the upcoming year.
The event had a humble beginning in the town of Burleson, Texas in the early 1990s and now takes place in all 50 states and over 20 countries around the world.
“A small group of teenagers in Burleson, Texas, came together for a DiscipleNow weekend in early 1990,” the See You At The Pole website explains. “On Saturday night their hearts were penetrated like never before, when they became broken before God and burdened for their friends. Compelled to pray, they drove to three different schools that night. Not knowing exactly what to do, they went to the school flagpoles and prayed for their friends, schools, and leaders. Those students had no idea how God would use their obedience.”
Every year has a theme, with this year’s theme based on Ephesians 6:18, “Never Stop Praying.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom had been active in the days leading up to the event, providing students with information for administrators that might try to stop them from praying.
“Students don’t abandon their constitutional freedoms at the schoolhouse gate,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco. “They continue to have the freedom to peacefully express their beliefs while at school, and that certainly includes prayer. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech for all students, regardless of the students’ religious or political beliefs.”
A Christian legal organization is raising the alarm about a California charter school who is removing all books from their library that contain Christian content.
The cleansing of Christians from the Springs Charter Schools was exposed by officials with the Pacific Justice Institute. The school claims to be “Created and operated by parents” and says that “we value parent choice and involvement, using the community as the classroom, fostering a child’s innate creativity, collaborating to achieve goals, building relationships, and personalizing learning.”
A concerned parent first raised the alarm when librarians started removing the book The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom from the shelves. The librarians said they were ordered to remove anything containing Christian content.
“It is alarming that a school library would attempt to purge books from religious authors. Indeed, some of the greatest literature of Western Civilization comes from people of faith,” PJI President Brad Dacus stated in a press release about the matter. “Are they going to ban the sermons or speeches of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? What about the Declaration of Independence, which invokes the laws of nature and nature’s God?”
“We are calling on Springs Charter Schools to immediately reverse their ill-conceived and illegal book-banning policy.”
A school superintendent who claims that he is a “man of faith” told a school principal and his teachers that they can no longer have a prayer chain for the sick and needy.
“I’m a man of faith who wants good for all, but I’m also a firm believer in separation of church and state,” Medina Schools Superintendent Dave Knight told The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Still, this “man of faith” Dave Knight told Principal Chad Wise of A.I. Root Middle School that he had to stop a prayer chain for community members dealing with a number of difficulties. The plan was to uplift those who were facing illness, dealing with family deaths or in the middle of neglect or abuse cases.
“Public school staff can’t use district resources, including email, to promote prayer, especially when the principal, a person in a position of influence, is involved,” “Man of Faith” Knight told reporters. “When it comes to separation of church and state, it’s very clear.”
The principal was advised a single e-mail asking for keeping a family in “thoughts and prayers” was permissible but the prayer chain was a bridge too far.
Principal Wise says he will continue the prayer chain on his own time outside of school e-mail and outside the reach of “man of faith” Knight.
A former Portland-area teacher who stood up to Planned Parenthood is filing a lawsuit after the school punished him and refused to renew his contract.
Bill Diss, an 11-year math and computer science teacher at Benson High School in Portland, Oregon, has been an outspoken critic of Planned Parenthood and their abortion services. In March 2014, police removed him because he refused to allow the abortionists in his classroom.
The abortionists were going through the school bribing students to sign up for a program by promising gifts and cash.
In 2012, he had refused to allow the group into the classroom. The principal and vice principal then came into the room and temporarily removed him from the room. The next day, the school forced him to sit on instruction from Planned Parenthood. The school also used his name on documents sent home with students promoting Planned Parenthood without his permission.
“Because he expressed his opposition to the activities of Planned Parenthood at Benson High School, [Diss] became a target,” the legal challenge reads. “They launched a full-scale assault on the plaintiff as a teacher. He was observed and evaluated on the most minute aspects of his teaching.”
“As the attention mounted, the plaintiff was summoned for questioning by Benson High School administrators,” the lawsuit states. “He was interrogated about his activities by the principal and by an attorney for the district. The activities in question occurred on his own time, not at school, nonetheless he was specifically instructed not to mention the fact that he was a teacher or where he worked when making public statements.”
The school denies they persecuted this teacher because he would not support the abortionist group.
In a victory for the religious freedom of Christians, Arkansas State University has announced they will allow players to continue to have cross shaped stickers on their helmets to pay tribute to fallen classmates.
The only condition from the school is that the players pay for the stickers themselves and that they personally place them on the helmets.
The stickers, which bare the initials of classmates Markel Owens and Barry Weyer who died in the last year, had been placed on all the helmets as a way for the team to pay tribute. An anti-Christian attorney in Jonesboro, Louis Nisenbaum, saw one of the players on TV with a cross on his helmet and sent a threatening letter to the school.
After initially saying they would remove the crosses in response to the anti-Christianist, the school relented after student athletes contacted various religious freedom organizations to defend their religious freedom.
“In the interest of allowing our student-athletes to memorialize their fallen colleagues, Markel Owens and Barry Weyer, it is the university’s position that any player who wishes to voluntarily place an NCAA-compliant sticker on their helmet to memorialize these individuals will be able to do so,” University attorney Linda McDaniel wrote.
“This is a great victory for the players of Arkansas State University,” Liberty Institute litigation director Hiram Sasser remarked following the decision. “The university officials and the Arkansas attorney general did the right thing restoring the religious liberty and free speech rights of the players to have the original cross sticker design if they so choose and we commend them for doing so.”
Riding the coattails of a national anti-Christian organization, a group of New York Satanists plan to give students of a Florida information how to worship satan.
Orlando high school students had Bibles made available to them on what the school called “Religious Freedom Day.” The anti-Christian group Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a suit against the school after they were not allowed to give out anti-Christian materials at the event.
The material in question contained explicit and inappropriate content for children.
The school backed down from the FFRF after the lawsuit was filed and permission was given for the FFRF to promote their hate against Christians in the school.
Now, the New York based Satanic Temple has announced they will be providing materials to the students during Religious Freedom Day.
“I am quite certain that all of the children in these Florida schools are already aware of the Christian religion and it’s Bible, and this might be the first exposure these children have to the actual practice of Satanism,” spokesperson Lucien Greaves wrote in a recent press release about the matter. “We think many students will be very curious to see what we offer.”
The materials from the group including coloring pages of goat’s heads.
A group of Tennessee high school cheerleaders is refusing to allow out of state anti-Christian groups to take away a tradition of pre-game prayer before football games.
Oneida High School had been offering prayers over the loudspeaker before the start of football games since 1930. Two years ago, the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association told schools to stop doing the prayers because of threats of lawsuits from those wanting to remove Christians from society.
The school continued but began to get threats from outside anti-Christianist groups because of the prayers. So the school replaced the prayers with a moment of silence. The team, coaches and fans said they could feel a difference in the atmosphere at the games when the prayers stopped.
And that’s when the cheerleaders stepped in.
Cheerleader Asia Canada stood during the moment of silence and began to say the Lord’s Prayer out loud. The rest of the squad joined her. Soon, the entire stadium was saying the prayer.
And because it’s student led, the anti-Christianists can do nothing about it.
“The removal of prayer before football games wasn’t an option in my opinion,” cheerleader Kayla King told the Independent Herald. “It’s your option what you do during that moment of silence, whether you say a prayer or not, but ‘as for me and my house, we will worship the Lord.’ I’m thankful for the community I live in and hope to represent it well.”
Students, parents, community leaders and pastors gathered in Hartsville, South Carolina for a weekend rally in support of allowing prayer to be placed back in schools.
The Hartsville Center Theater hosted over 450 people who listened to leaders throughout the community talking of the need for prayer, the power of prayer and also to join together in songs of praise to God.
It was the second rally hosted by Florence One School Board member Pat Gibson Hye-Moore and Pastor of New Providence Baptist Church Cliff Leonard. The men said it was the larger of the two events. The event grew from a concern “that morality has plunged in America since prayer was removed from school.”
“We’re taking God out of everything,” lamented Hye-Moore. “We are taking the Creator, the one that created everything, we’re just trying to kick Him out and He’s not happy with that.”
South Carolina representatives in 2013 proposed a bill introducing a moment of silence prayer in the schools but it has not progressed beyond its introduction.
A Maryland community college is again facing a lawsuit for rejecting a student due to his Christian faith.
The American Center for Law and Justice has filed suit against Community College of Baltimore County on behalf of Dustin Buxton after they denied him permission to enter their radiation therapy program.
Buxton had cited his faith during his interview as an applicant.
“During that interview in 2013, Dustin was asked by the CCBC interview panel, ‘What do you base your morals on?’ Dustin replied, ‘My faith,’” ACLJ attorney Michelle Terry outlined in a report this week. “His faith was not mentioned again, yet, in a written review of his interview, the program director, Adrienne Dougherty, stated that Dustin had lost points because ‘[Dustin] also brought up religion a great deal during the interview. Yes, this is a field that involves death and dying; but religion cannot be brought up in the clinic by therapist or students.’”
The ACLJ had filed suit against the same school for denying Brandon Jenkins entry into the same program because of his Christian beliefs.
Reports have been released of a Muslim man who threatened to shot up an Ohio high school because of his hatred of Israel.
Police said that a man “with a heavy accent” called Pickerington North High School Wednesday morning and said that he would be shooting students at the school with an AK-47 assault rifle. The man said he was “Mohammed Shehad” and that his actions would be in response to Israel’s actions in the Gaza strip.
The school was put into lockdown until police could determine there was no actual threat in the area of the school.
Police say that no one has been arrested and it’s likely the threat has passed but they were not taking anything for granted.
“There is no way to be absolutely certain,” Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalen said.
Terrorism analyst Patrick Poole, who lives in Ohio, said radical Islam in Ohio is on the rise.
“We have had a growing problem here in the Columbus area for years that local law enforcement and the media want to continue to sweep under the carpet,” Poole said. “Not only has central Ohio been the home of the largest known al-Qaeda cell since 9/11—with several members currently in prison on terrorism charges and at least two deported—we’ve had a number of cases of homegrown jihadists come through town.”
