Few Attend Prayer Day at Schools : Religion: A Burbank principal questions whether the annual flagpole gatherings violate the Constitution.

A national campaign by evangelical Christian groups urging high school students to pray at their school flagpoles Wednesday morning fizzled in the San Fernando Valley, where there were tiny turnouts at the only two schools where organizers said gatherings were planned.

Even in those cases, some non-students took part, prompting a Burbank principal to say that she may consider whether the event violates the constitutional separation of church and state, if the backers organize another such activity next year.

Wednesday was the scheduled day for the third “See You at the Pole” event promoted by numerous evangelical groups. About 1.5 million students nationwide turned out for the second event last year, organizers said.

But at the 2,600-student El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, only one student showed up for the 7 a.m. event Wednesday, 10th-grader Nick Nichols, vice president of the school’s 35-member Christian club.

At 1,950-student Burbank High School, Principal Keiko Hentell said 16 people appeared, but only six were students. The others, who are associated with a Foursquare Church, included some students from other schools, but one was an adviser for a church youth group and at least one person was college-age, Hentell said.

The American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative religious legal aid agency based in Virginia Beach, Va., defended the prayer day as constitutional under current court guidelines.

But Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a liberal lobbying group headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., is watching how it unfolds in practice.

“We are not against student free speech,” said Steven Green, legal counsel for Americans United, “but our position is that if students have full and ultimate say in the organizing and running of such prayer gatherings, it is constitutional in most instances. However, our information leads us to believe that the event is orchestrated and manipulated by outside religious groups with an agenda of proselytizing others.”

Kent Huckstep, a spokesman for one of the national organizers, the San Diego-based National Network of Youth Ministries, said his group does in fact urge that only students take part.

“We advise that if parents, teachers and church youth workers want to take part, they should do so across the street,” Huckstep said.

Hentell said, however, that she worries about the legal ramifications of allowing an outside-organized religious event to take place on her campus.

“The kids can do this voluntarily on their own, but when you have outsiders involved, we get into a gray area of whether we can allow it on a school campus,” Hentell said. “We’ll see if we are going to have to enforce our rules” prohibiting outside-organized religious activities.

At El Camino High, English teacher Jeff Craig, sponsor of the Christian Club, joined Nichols and the two prayed together for about five minutes after no one else appeared.

“I only heard on Monday that the prayer day was supposed to be this Wednesday,” said Craig, and he had no time to advise other members of the club to attend.

About a dozen people took part in the prayer session at the pole last year, he said.