In June 2023 Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB763 into law. This legislation allows for the employment or voluntary inclusion of chaplains in school districts and open-enrollment charter schools. These chaplains would be tasked with providing support, services, and programs for students and would not require certification by the state board for educator certification. Some restrictions are included to ensure the suitability of individuals serving as chaplains, particularly emphasizing background checks to prevent anyone with certain criminal convictions from serving in this role.
Following the passage of the bill, a swathe of states followed suit and introduced similar bills in the current session which has caused a backlash from civil liberties and religious freedom groups. Let's take a look at the bills and examine the concerns.
Which States Have Introduced Bills?
This stakeholder page lists the bills introduced since 2023 which seek to allow chaplains to provide support services in schools. There are 22 bills in total covering 15 states:
Only the Texas bill has so far been signed into law. Three of them are dead - a Texas companion bill, HB514 in Utah and HB1016 in Mississippi. That leaves 12 states with active bills, largely in committee. The only bill to have passed both chambers is H931 in Florida which is currently awaiting the signature of Governor Ron De Santis.
What Do the Bills Do?
All the bills tend to have the same elements, drawn from the Texas bill. They:
- Allow chaplains to work in schools, either as volunteers or paid employees;
- Allow them to provide some kind of loosely defined services, often leaving it up to individual schools or school boards to define the role;
- Do not require the chaplains to have formal qualifications or certification;
- Do require basic screening, to ensure the chaplain is not a convicted sex offender.
The Florida bill goes further, and requires school boards to produce a list of chaplains, including their religious affiliation, for parents to choose from and parents must also give written consent before a student participates in any activity. Indiana's SB50 does require qualifications - a chaplain must have a Master's degree in divinity, theology or religious studies but is nevertheless allowed to provide secular support services without parental permission.
What are the Concerns?
Proponents of the bills argue that school chaplains would help address the current shortage of counselors and support workers, amid a growing demand for mental health support in schools. According to Education Week, teen mental health has been worsening for more than a decade and this trend was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, 42% of students reported feeling sad or hopeless, up from 26% in 2009. Depression and anxiety among young people doubled during the pandemic lockdown period. This is at a time when qualified school counselors and psychologists remain scarce. The counselor-to-student ratio nationally stood at 385 students to one counselor in 2022–23, compared with 408 students to one counselor the previous school year, the American School Counselor Association found in a February analysis of federal data.
“We see chaplains in many of our public sector entities. If the federal government allows chaplain services in the military, shouldn’t we allow our children to have access to these services as well?” Ryan Kennedy, the manager of policy and advocacy for the Florida Citizens Alliance, told lawmakers in a committee hearing on the Florida bill.
Those who oppose such bills do so for a number of reasons. The bills by and large give no definition of what a school chaplain actually is and require no formal accreditation or training. More than 200 chaplains from a variety of faiths and work setting , including prisons and military bases, signed a letter in March urging lawmakers to reject the legislation. They argued that while chaplains perform a valuable role in providing religious services in places where people may struggle to access them (such as prisons or while on military service overseas), that is not the case in public schools. Moreover, they state that chaplains simply lack the expertise to provide mental health support or therapy.
Others fear that it could make the mental health crisis worse, for some students. "Especially if you are a 2SLGBTQ+ student and you needed somebody to talk to, are the chaplains going to offer them any assistance? Are they just going to pray with them? Are they going to out these students to an abusive household?" said Cindy Nguyen from the ACLU of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma Representative Danny Williams disagrees. "This is not an implementation," Williams said. "This is an advisory capacity. If you don't want to go listen to them, there's nobody that forces you to do that."
Is the Legislation Constitutional?
(Image is AI generated - I suspect a Satanic Temple chaplain would probably not actually have horns)
It's early days for school chaplain legislation, and so it's not clear how laws will be implemented in practice if bills are enacted. One organization that has expressed an interest in providing new chaplains is the Satanic Temple. “Our ministers look forward to participating in opportunities to do good in the community, including the opportunities created by this bill, right alongside the clergy of other religions.” wrote The Satanic Temple’s director of ministry, who goes by Penemue Grigori, in an email following the passage of the Florida bill.
Devon Graham, Florida State Director for American Atheists, feels that based on her read of the bill, the Satanic Temple would have every right to make good on that promise. “They are indeed a church and so they can offer up whoever they want as long as they can pass a background check,” said Graham.
Florida Representative Dean Black was not worried. “It’s also under the purview of the parents. I don’t think many parents are going to want their children meeting with those people,” said Black.
The Satanic Temple defines its mission as to encourage benevolence and empathy, oppose injustice and undertake noble pursuits according to seven fundamental tenets. While the Temple is an unusual example, its interest serves to highlight an important issue. There are thousands of different Christian denominations alone, not to mention other religions. How do you prevent students from minority faiths or denominations from feeling excluded?
The ACLU goes further, and sees the legislation as violating students' and families' religious-freedom rights. “The First Amendment protects the right of all students to attend public schools without the risk of school staff evangelizing them or imposing religion in any other way,” said Heather L. Weaver, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
How Will the Legislation be Implemented?
The only law to so far make it to the statute books, in Texas, included a requirement that school boards must take a vote before March 1 on whether to employ chaplains. The surprising results, according to the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, is that the 25 largest school districts in Texas, altogether accounting for a third of the students in Texas, voted against creating chaplain programs. And news reports show many smaller districts, even in traditionally conservative areas, also rejecting the programs. The Austin Board noted that chaplains would be eligible to volunteer under existing programs, if they meet the more stringent criteria.
Other states may be different, but if Texas is a guide then the legislators' wishes may not be translated into action in schools as they may have hoped.
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