In this article, the author discusses how a school district in Modesto, California deals with religious diversity. Modesto requires that every 9th-grader in the district enroll in a semester-long world religions course. Ninth grade made sense--students were old enough to handle the subject material, and the emphasis on religious diversity happened…

This article reports on the fiery California atheist who lost his bid at the U.S. Supreme Court to get "under God" stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance. Dr. Michael A. Newdow, an emergency-room physician with a law degree who represented himself before the Supreme Court in the high-profile case against the Elk Grove, California, school…

From northern California to southern Florida, there are just too many superintendents who are reluctant to touch religion with the proverbial 10-foot pole. Following the let-sleeping-dogs-lie approach to administration, they start to think about First Amendment solutions only after a fight breaks out. By then it is often too late to avert a bitter…

Pledging allegiance to the flag--and the "one nation under God" it is said to represent--has been second nature to generations of American schoolchildren. Yet few have had as much reason to reflect on the practice as those in Sacramento, California. Since March 2000, California's Elk Grove school district has faced a legal challenge to…

California's Proposition 8, known as "The Victims' Bill of Rights," contains a safe-schools provision that states: "All students and staff of primary, elementary, junior high and senior high schools have the inalienable right to attend campuses which are safe, secure and peaceful." Through extended reference to federal and…

This handbook informs the reader of the provisions of the constitutions and statutes of California and the United States as they are interpreted by the courts to affect the rights and responsibilities of public school students. The first of the handbook's seven sections reviews the constitutional rights of students, their right and their duty to…