Ohio school boards lose  a little ‘liberty’

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2:22 PM Wednesday, July 15, 2009

An amendment offered by Butler County’s state senator, Gary Cates, R-West Chester, was part of the $50.5 billion, two-year state budget approved on Monday, July 13. But don’t be confused. Cates’ amendment does not address the state’s staggering budget crisis, which will force thousands of state-employee layoffs and program cuts, or Ohio’s rising unemployment rate in the general population.

Instead, it targets a single public school district in Ohio — Oberlin Schools in Lorain County — which, for the last 30 years, has not required the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in its classrooms.

So, thanks to Cates’ amendment, local boards of education across Ohio will be forbidden from adopting policies that would restrict the recitation of the pledge in classrooms or change its wording in any way.

How disappointing that state lawmakers used the crisis surrounding the state budget to pass this unnecessary measure (as well as several others not directly related to the budget). And it’s ironic that, in a nation founded on freedom and liberty, we need the hammer of state government to ensure that malleable first-graders are required to repeat their national loyalty every morning.

“The legislature cannot be in the business of deciding what people can or cannot say,” Carrie Davis, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (which opposes the amendment), told the Chronicle-Telegram newspaper in Elyria this week.

Let’s be clear. The Pledge of Allegiance is not under attack in Ohio. We support its voluntary recitation in classrooms, as do most school boards across the state. Its words are a solemn reminder of the “liberty and justice for all” that the American flag represents and for which many lives have been sacrificed over the past 233 years. Fortunately, the Cates amendment allows that individual students still have the option not to say the pledge if they choose.

Our beef is that Columbus is interfering in decisions that belong to local school boards — once again, taking away a fraction more of the little local control that remains — and in matters that local communities can decide for themselves. And they’re using an elephant gun — an amendment tucked away in a $50.5 billion state budget — to swat a gnat.

Residents in the Oberlin School District have been debating their school board’s long-standing Pledge of Allegiance policy, and presumably voters there will express their satisfaction with that policy when they elect board members this fall — just as they have for decades.

However, they need not worry about it now. The Legislature and Gov. Ted Strickland — who reportedly has no plans to strike the amendment from the final budget — has decided the matter for them.

“I think it’s sad that it came to the point that the state government felt the need to step in and do what we were trying to do ourselves,” Oberlin parent Shawn Marcin, a supporter of the pledge, told the Chronicle-Telegram. So do we, Mr. Marcin.

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