Russian Christian students suspended for praying at a Washington school

Posted on March 11, 2007

We read:

“A dozen students attending Heritage High School in Vancouver, Wash., located on the state’s southern border, were suspended on Friday for praying at school. Ten in the group were suspended for ten days while two received one-day, in-school suspensions for holding a morning prayer meeting. The group has now sought out legal assistance.

According to the group’s statement, the affected students had met together a few weeks ago to initiate a school prayer club. They were refused by the school’s vice principal, Alex Otoupal, who explained that they could not meet in a private room.

The individuals, who met for about two weeks before 7 a.m., decided to pray in the school cafeteria, instead, where an alleged Satanist student complained to the school office. The area was considered to be a well-trafficked area, and the prayer meeting supposedly would disrupt education

The prayer group was instructed by the vice principal to go and pray outside rather than in the cafeteria. The students persisted in praying in the lunch room, however, because of the inclement weather outside. As a result, they were suspended for ten days.

Source

If they had been Muslims it would have been just fine, of course.

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Comments

6 Responses to “Russian Christian students suspended for praying at a Washington school”

Jim on March 11th, 2007 6:26 pm

“If they had been Muslims it would have been just fine, of course.” Too true! The People’s Republik of Washington does a disservice to its namesake.
Ogre on March 12th, 2007 5:52 am

Not quite — if they had been Muslims, they would have been meeting with the school’s permission and would be joined by faculty and staff and have a budget from the taxpayer funds to pay for their activities.
DBK on March 12th, 2007 9:41 am

Your report, and source, is wildly inaccurate. They were suspended for holding their meetings in a place that blocked student traffic. They were not only not denied permission to form a club, but were given all of the information they needed to form the club and offered assistance in doing so. The district has rules and policies with respect to forming clubs and does not prohibit the forming of clubs for religious purposes by students. The students, in essence, were seeking extra rights that other students do not have.

Please research these sorts of pieces more closely as this misinformation about the incident at Heritage High School in Vancouver, WA has been widely misreported by people who have an agenda and the facts do not support your source’s version of events. It is possible that they were refused a private room by a school administrator on one occasion, but that seems, according to the accounts I have read (and I have read pretty much every account on this story and also had contact with people in Vancouver familiar with the school), to have been an error on that administrator’s part that was corrected not long afterwards by school officials who, as I said, discussed forming a club with the students per the rules. It is unclear whether Vice Principal Alex Otoupal did anything wrong, however, so I don’t think we can claim he was wrong here absent more authoritative information.

Be wary of what that lawyer from Liberty Counsel is saying, by the way, since his remarks directly contradict pretty much every version of the story that preceded his entrance into the matter.
DBK on March 12th, 2007 9:44 am

One correction. The Liberty Counsel attorney whose statements contradict the reports that preceded her is not a “he” but a “she”. Her name is Anita Staver.
Paul on March 12th, 2007 2:46 pm

So, a bunch of students that wouldn’t stop disrupting the school cafeteria were suspended? How is this a problem? Is there no church they can go to?
Jim on March 12th, 2007 3:28 pm

To Ogre: ROTFLMAO!!