Schools Do Flip-Flop on Religious Clubs : Torrance Trustees Ban Student Meetings During Lunch Hour After All

Reversing an earlier decision, the Torrance school board decided by a 3-2 vote to ban student religious clubs from high school classrooms during the lunch period, but gave final approval to a policy allowing the groups to hold prayer meetings in the buildings before and after the regular school day.

The decision, based on the board majority’s interpretation of the federal Equal Access Act of 1984, stunned club members and their supporters, who thought they had persuaded a majority of the trustees to include the lunch hour in the policy.

In changing his position Monday night, board President Owen Griffith indicated his concern about the workability of a more liberal interpretation of the new law.

Wider Ban Demanded

Several adult Christian counselors said they would mount a communitywide campaign by parents, teachers, clergymen and students to persuade the board to reverse itself again. If that effort fails, the counselors said, supporters of the student clubs will take the district to court--an outcome that trustees had predicted, no matter what decision they made.

The counselors also demanded that the district ban all other student clubs from noon meetings to avoid discriminating against the religious groups. Such a ban would cover scores of scholastic, social and political groups of the type that have been holding officially sanctioned campus meetings for years.

“We lost a battle, but we didn’t lose the war,” said Glenn Ruby, director of Campus Outreach and Counseling Inc., a non-denominational Torrance-based group that provides spiritual and personal guidance to students. “We won’t stop fighting until the full rights of (religious) students are recognized.”

Ruby confirmed reports that at least 30 Christian student clubs meet regularly in classrooms in the South Bay, the Los Angeles Unified School District and in Orange County--and have done so for more than a decade.

‘We lost a battle, but we didn’t lose the war. We won’t stop fighting.’ --Glenn Ruby, Campus Outreach director “It’s no big secret,” he said. “We operate in the open and we don’t go on the campus to organize or coerce anyone. We’re strictly an off-campus organization.”

The first of the groups, called New Life Clubs, was started at now-defunct Aviation High in Redondo Beach in 1971, he said. Informal permission to meet in classrooms usually comes from a principal or teacher “who sees nothing but good in the meetings,” Ruby said.

Torrance threw out the clubs in the mid-1970s, Ruby said, largely through the influence of Bernard Garen, now the district’s deputy superintendent and legal counsel.

“That man is a thorn in our side,” Ruby said, noting that the Torrance clubs have continued to meet informally on campus lawns.

In the current controversy, Garen has adamantly opposed opening classrooms to student religious clubs, particularly during the lunch hour. He contends that “school sponsorship” of such meetings would inevitably lead to a breakdown in the separation of church and state.

Doug Stone, director of the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, told the board Monday night that a decision in favor of noon meetings would also open a “Pandora’s box of consequences.” Among them, he said, might be an invasion of campuses by “hate and other extremist groups that would disrupt the learning process.”

Trustee John Barberis termed such fears a “bugaboo . . . (something) that hasn’t been a problem in Torrance. I think we can control the negative aspects.” He said the religious clubs inspired “good positive traits in students.”

David Sargent, who joined Barberis on the losing side of the vote against noon meetings, said the board majority’s “ill-conceived action” took the “equality” out of the Equal Access Act, which he said was intended to end discrimination against religiously inclined students.

Existing lunchtime clubs will have to be banned under the new policy, Sargent said, unless the administration can persuade the board that their activities are curriculum-related.

Board members Fumiko Waserman and Doris Casstevens said their minds were not closed to noon meetings, but in the meantime they wanted to get more opinions on their legality--including a long-awaited conclusion from the county’s legal counsel.

Other Districts Waiting

In other districts, school boards generally have been slow to step into the emotional and highly controversial issues raised by the law signed by President Reagan in August. For the few that have, policies range from totally banning student religious groups--as in Agoura Hills--to giving them official sanction--as in the Newport-Mesa district in Orange County.

The controversy in the Capistrano district led to all student groups being banned. David Llewellyn, a Santa Ana attorney who specializes in Christian legal causes, said Capistrano parents may make a decision this week on starting the long legal process to test the new law in the courts.