Texas State School Board Offers Narrow Policy On Student Religious Speech

Earlier this year, the Texas legislature passed and the governor signed the Religious Viewpoint Anti-Discrimination Act that requires schools to establish "a limited public forum for student speakers at all school events at which a student is to publicly speak". The law goes on to set out a model policy that schools may adopt to meet the requirements of the law. (See prior posting.) However, today's Austin (TX) American-Statesman reports that the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) has furnished its members with a different-- and narrower-- model policy that they could use to meet the requirements of the statute. Unlike the statutory model, the TASB policy does not require schools to have student speakers introduce football games and school announcements. More importantly, perhaps, the TASB policy says that public speech to which the new law applies is only speech in the student's own words-- and not speech that is first approved by school officials. Proponents of the law are concerned that schools adopting the TASB model could avoid the law's thrust by requiring all student remarks to first be approved by school officials.