ATLANTA — Georgia lawmakers have filed a bill requiring that public schools adopt policies to let students leave for at least one hour per week to participate in religious moral education.
The Student Character Development Act would make school districts allow for a “released time course,” which is defined specifically as a “course in religious moral instruction provided by a person or organization independently of a public school.”
The policies for school districts will require a student’s parent or guardian gives written permission to have them attend the course, and that the course’s sponsor keeps attendance records.
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Parents and students would be responsible for travel, though a provision of the bill would allow for waivers to have the organization handling the courses take care of transport.
As far as the courses’ funding, no public funds would be allowed for use in the religious lessons outside of administrative costs for providing or accommodating the released time course, the text of House Bill 133 reads.
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Participating students would also be responsible for any missed school work.
The bill would allow school districts to adopt policies that award academic credit for completing the religious moral courses, though the courses themselves must be evaluated “on purely secular criteria that are substantially the same criteria used to evaluate similar courses for purposes of determining academic credit.”
Academic credit decisions for the released time courses must not be decided via tests for religious content or denominational affiliation.
Instead, the determining factors must be how many hours of classroom instruction, a review of the course syllabus and materials used, the methods of assessment used during the religious moral courses and the qualifications of course instructors to teach them.
The bill would also require that students are not counted as absent while attending an off-campus class, that the Department of Education is authorized to take steps to maximize state and federal funding to agencies regardless of how many students take the released time courses and that the Education Department must create policies to make assessments consistent with state law for use by local school districts.
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