Middle School Teacher's Memorial

[Pyrrho]

A Religious Memorial Honoring a Middle School Teacher is Altered after Atheists Point out Constitutional Problems

In 2004, Ravenswood Middle School (West Virginia) teacher Joann Christy died in an accident. It was obviously devastating to the community and the school built a memorial in her honor.
The problem is that the memorial included several Christian crosses and images of angels:


The Freedom From Religion Foundation, when told about the problem, faced a tough dilemma: Should they ask school officials to alter the monument and remove the Christian symbols on principle, even if it led to emotion-driven backlash from people in the area?

I am torn on this. On one hand, I understand the issue here. You can't have Christian symbols at a school. The crosses were removed, not the angels as they're not really Christian symbols.

I just think this one is a little petty. It's a plaque for a beloved teacher and community figure on the sidewalk. I feel the same way about the roadside crosses that FFRF was asking to be taken down. It seems petty.

On the other hand, there are no degrees in this. You can't have religious symbols on school property. I am sure that a beloved teacher who was an satanist and whose family wanted to honor him with a pentagram sidewalk plaque would get rejected instantly. But that hasn't happened, so we can't really know, can we?

Torn.

First things first. Not every teacher who dies gets a memorial at the school. So we can question whether or not this one should get one. Second, no memorial is going to reveal everything about the teacher. So leaving things off about the teacher is necessary. In such an instance as this, the teacher's religious views (if, indeed, the memorial accurately depicts them, as many memorials represent the views of the relatives) should be irrelevant to the teacher being a good teacher. In other words, it is not the place for discussions of the teacher's religion, if any. If the teacher should have a memorial at the school, it should be about being a great teacher, not about something irrelevant to what should be going on in the classroom. So religious symbols are entirely inappropriate at the school and should never have been installed.

Additionally, you are quite right that "I am sure that a beloved teacher who was an satanist and whose family wanted to honor him with a pentagram sidewalk plaque would get rejected instantly." We all know that the Christians would all scream about that. And, indeed, they would be right to object, because the school is not the proper place for religious symbols. Which means, there should be no religious symbols on any teacher's memorial at a public school.