Education Officials Welcome Ruling on Graduation Prayer : Reaction: County superintendent and other administrators expect Supreme Court action to revive commencement invocations. But one school attorney warns they may still be illegal.

School officials around the county Tuesday welcomed the idea of student-initiated prayer at high school graduations, but an Orange County Department of Education attorney said such prayer probably isn’t legal in California.

One day after the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an appeals court decision allowing a Houston-area high school senior to pray from the podium, Orange County superintendents and school board members were unaware of any local students who wanted to take advantage of the ruling at graduations this spring.

However, they expect Monday’s Supreme Court action to eventually revive benedictions and invocations at public school graduations, prayer that has been absent from Orange County schools since at least 1987.

“It’s an important part of the lives of many people in Orange County, religion and church,” said John Dean, county superintendent of schools, adding that he is “delighted” with the decision.

“They came out of a tradition of having a prayer at graduation, kind of invoking God’s prayer on these young people as they go out into the world,” Dean said. “It’s part of getting some formality back into graduation.”

Santa Ana Unified Supt. Rudy M. Castruita agreed, saying, “Youngsters do need some kind of spiritual motivation.”

And Jerry Sullivan, president of the board of Huntington Beach Union High School District, said: “If students want to say a prayer before graduation, I’ll be the first to go along with it.”

But some administrators worried that they would have to regulate prayer and ensure it is nondenominational, and Ronald Wenkart, general counsel for the county’s Education Department, said he would advise districts against allowing graduation prayer at all.

Wenkart pointed to two California cases--a 1991 state Supreme Court decision and a 1987 ruling by the Court of Appeal--in which prayer was prohibited at graduations even though students helped select the teachers or clergy members delivering the prayers.

Because the high court did not rule directly on the Houston case but simply upheld an appeals court decision, Wenkart said the action does not nullify the California rulings.

Schools are “not required to allow student-initiated prayers. . . . If they do they might be in violation of (California law) and they might be sued,” said Wenkart, who plans to send guidelines to school districts in the next few days advising how to deal with the court’s action. “Our advice will be they should not allow prayers at graduation ceremonies.”

With graduations already planned over the next few weeks, most programs have already been printed and speakers scheduled, so any additions of prayer this year would be last-minute and unlikely, officials said.

Next year, though, it may be different.

“This country was founded on people having the right to pray,” said Edgar Seal, superintendent of Brea-Olinda Unified School District. “This nation was founded on (religious) ideals, and the further we get away from those ideals the more trouble we get into as a society.”

As long as prayer is non-sectarian, Capistrano Unified Supt. James A. Fleming said he would support it. “It may be well to return to a time when we reflect on larger values and issues,” he said.

But fitting prayer into public school graduations, administrators warned, could be complicated.

“If we do have prayers, there will have to be parameters so we don’t offend Christians or non-Christians,” pointed out Tustin Unified Supt. David Andrews.

Ed Dundon, superintendent of Garden Grove Unified, recalled “the old days” when benedictions and invocations were intrinsic to graduation, and said it was important to keep the prayers “general.”

“You would try to say something that was not offensive to any religious group,” he explained.

Barbara Paxton, president of Brea-Olinda Unified’s Board of Trustees, expressed concern that permitting prayer would “open up a whole other can of worms.”

“Whose prayer is it?” Paxton asked. “I don’t have a problem with prayer, but if it’s a Christian prayer, then you’ve upset people who are not religiously plugged into the Christian religion. The court has opened up a whole can of worms because they’ve put it onto local school districts to have to monitor that whole thing.”

Joyce Capelle, acting superintendent of the Orange Unified School District, feared a proliferation of prayer, one for every denomination or sect.

“Are we going to have a Druid group in burning a tree as part of their religion?” she wondered.

“Its impact remains to be tested, until someone steps forth to make a challenge, or to take advantage of the ruling,” Capelle said. “We just want to go through another year, graduate a lot of students, and meet our budget crises without promoting another crisis.”