This is a school board meeting for PUBLIC SCHOOLS in Blount County, Tennessee.
Watch how this meeting opens.
And during this very same meeting, the Blount County Board of Education voted to allow the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in its public schools.
Then they approved an agreement with the Elgin Children’s Foundation allowing the foundation to reimburse the district’s existing contracted school-bus operators to transport public-school students out of school during the school day to attend Christian Bible classes.
What exactly are we doing here?🤦♀️
Across this country, public school districts are struggling to do something pretty fundamental: get public school students to public school.
-Bus-driver shortages.
-Delayed and canceled routes.
-Parents scrambling for transportation.
-Kids spending ridiculous amounts of time on buses because districts don’t have enough drivers or resources.
But in Blount County, the district’s existing transportation system can apparently be used to take children away from public school for private Christian instruction.
And yes, we’re told the Elgin Children’s Foundation is supposedly reimbursing the transportation costs.
Great. Who is reimbursing the public for everything else?
The district oversight. The administrative time. The coordination. The use of a public-school transportation system and its existing contractors to facilitate a private religious program during the school day.
And more importantly: why is a public school district this involved in facilitating Christianity in the first place?
Then add Ten Commandments displays inside the schools…
Then watch this video again.
🚫 This isn’t a church board meeting.
👉 This is a public school board meeting.
Public schools exist to educate children and serve all of them—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, agnostic and everyone else.
🚫 They are not churches.
🚫 They are not Bible schools.
🚫 And their transportation systems should not become shuttle services for private Christian instruction.
🚨This is wildly inappropriate. It is a profound departure from what public education is supposed to be, and it makes a mockery of the idea that our public schools are religiously neutral institutions serving every child equally.
👏You cannot keep wrapping government-facilitated Christianity in words like “voluntary,” “optional,” and “reimbursed” and pretend the underlying problem disappears.
IT DOESN’T.
And the Elgin Children’s Foundation? That rabbit hole deserves its own post. More to come….
What people are saying:
- Facebook User: This is a VERY common practice for school boards – every board of education meeting I’ve ever attended (in multiple districts – both red and blue) has started with a prayer. I was told prayers are acceptable because they’re “non-denominational”, but I disagree!
- Secular Education Association: Facebook User Yep — and that’s part of the problem. It has become so normalized in some places that people barely question it anymore.
A public school board opening its meeting with prayer should not just be shrugged off because “everyone does it.” Normalizing religious practices in public-school governance is how the line keeps getting pushed further and further.
And then you look at what else this board is doing, and the pattern matters.
- Secular Education Association: Facebook User Yep — and that’s part of the problem. It has become so normalized in some places that people barely question it anymore.
- Facebook User: There needs to be a HUGE lawsuit. What the actual fuck.
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