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‘See You at the Pole’ – The Sequel

Students at a New Mexico middle school will get a “do over” for “See You At The Pole” after their prayer time was cut short last month on the day of the annual event.

On the morning of September 22, more than a dozen students at James Monroe Middle School in Albuquerque gathered around the flag pole to pray — just like students all across the country and around the world were doing. But the student-led and student-initiated prayer time at this school did not last long, according to Jennifer Monk, associate general counsel for Advocates for Faith & Freedom (AFF).

“Unfortunately the principal showed up and told them a few minutes after they started praying that they had to stop praying, that they could not to do that on school campus,” says Monk. “He addressed ‘separation of church and state’ and traffic issues — but we have pictures of that morning and there’s no traffic in the parking lot. It was early, before school [started].”

AFF describes the separation-of-church-and-state argument as “misleading” and an “oft-used rationale [that] is not found in our Constitution and cannot be used to prevent students from independently praying on public school grounds.”

After being contacted by some of the students, AFF group sent a demand letter to the principal and other school officials advising them of the students’ First Amendment rights to gather to pray on their own time. “Within an hour of receiving the letter,” says AFF, the principal contacted them and agreed to let the students resume their prayers tomorrow morning (October 13), albeit on the basketball court.

“Well, he doesn’t want it at the flag pole because he’s concerned about the traffic, which again we disagree that there’s a problem with traffic,” Monk shares, “but the basketball court is in the front of the school and really provides the exact same purpose.”

Monk says it is important for the students to complete what they had started — “just to really make sure that next year this doesn’t happen again.”

(Source: OneNewsNow.com)