The Center for Inquiry (CFI) calls on its supporters in Ohio to help defeat pending state legislation that would require all K–12 public schools to allow their students to leave school grounds during the school day to pursue religious education elsewhere.
CFI has fought such “release time” bills before, and we are determined to defeat HB 445, which is currently before the Ohio House of Representatives’ Primary and Secondary Education Committee.
HB 445 would allow all public school students to have release time for religious instruction off school grounds as long as they provide written consent from a parent or guardian. The bill stipulates that while a student is in a release time program, they will not be considered absent from school. Perhaps most strikingly, HB 445 would allow public high school students to earn up to two units of high school credit for completing a release time course in religious instruction.
CFI’s Office of Public Policy (OPP) has lobbied against this bill and submitted written testimony to the Ohio House of Representatives. As OPP’s testimony argues, HB 445 both harms the state of public education and infiltrates public schools with religious education—in clear contravention of the separation of church and state.
Students enrolled in public school are supposed to learn science, history, math, literature, civics, and other core subjects. Public schools have a limited amount of instructional time each week to accomplish these goals. HB 445 would instead divert students to off-grounds religious education, distracting students from their educational objectives and disrupting the course of the school day.
It is telling that Stand For Truth Ministry, which operates a release time program and is one of the primary supporters (and would-be beneficiaries) of HB 445, describes itself as a “Christian ministry that exists for one purpose, and one purpose only—to take the Gospel to students in America’s public schools.”
HB 445’s proponents have made their goals transparently clear. Now it is up to those who value the separation of church and state to make their voices heard. CFI urges its supporters in Ohio to contact their legislators and call for a vote against this theocratic bill.
