🚨 This is NOT appropriate. At all.🚨

LifeWise Academy in Norwalk, Ohio proudly posted photos of staff washing children’s feet as part of a “Journey to the Cross” lesson.

Public school students — minors — were taken off campus during the school day and placed into an adult-led religious ritual involving physical contact and a reenactment of biblical scenes they are far too young to contextualize.

And this isn’t hypothetical harm.

A public school teacher reached out to SEA anonymously to share that one of her students returned from a LifeWise session after what we assume to be this very lesson and asked:

👉 “What’s a prostitute?”

That’s the position teachers are being put in.

That’s what children are being exposed to.

And this is happening inside the school day, under the banner of a program districts are being pressured to adopt as “neutral.”

Let’s be extremely clear:

🔹 Foot-washing is an adult religious ritual, not an educational activity.

🔹 Children cannot give meaningful consent to intimate physical contact framed as “sacrificial.”

🔹 Lessons that force teachers to explain sexualized terms because a third-party religious program introduced them are wildly inappropriate.

🔹 Public schools have a duty to protect children from exactly this kind of boundary-crossing.

Families have been raising concerns for months — and every time, we’re told LifeWise is just “character education.” The photos tell a very different story.

This is why SEA exists: to protect secular, safe public education and to make sure that nothing like this is ever normalized in our schools.

*Edit to add: these are two separate occurrences, this is something that has been reported happening across multiple programs in different communities.

If parents or educators in Norwalk — or anywhere — have concerns or information, our inbox is open.

📧 contact@SecularEducationAssociation.org

And if you want to organize locally and push back, join your SEA state chapter. No one should be facing this alone.

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