COLUMN ONE : A Duel Over Prayer in Schools : Court ruling backing student-initiated prayer in Texas has led other states to act. It’s also led to a heated debate over free speech and the separation of church and state.

It’s springtime, when a high school senior’s thoughts turn to the prom, summer vacation and the collegiate adventure just around the corner.

But in this town--and an increasing number like it across Texas--many students are taking on weightier matters and find themselves at Ground Zero in a growing controversy over prayer in the public schools.

When three seniors at a public high school here proposed that a prayer be read at their graduation ceremony last year, their idea was put to a vote. Their fellow students agreed with them, and prayer--which for decades has been disappearing from the public schools--became part of the program.

All across Texas, student-initiated prayer has spread like a prairie fire since a federal appeals court, breaking with 30 years of judicial precedent, ruled last year that, while the Constitution bars school officials from initiating prayers, it does not stop students.

And when the Supreme Court refused without explanation to review the appeals court’s decision, Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice took the movement nationwide.

Last month it initiated what it called a “nationwide campaign to educate students about their constitutional right to pray and to speak about God.” In mailings to 35,000 school officials, the group asserted that students have a “free speech” right to have prayer at school events.

The American Civil Liberties Union is waging a vigorous counter-campaign. School officials are caught in the cross-fire as the ACLU and Robertson’s group mail dueling videotapes to every school system in the country, the ACLU’s stressing the traditional separation of church and state and Robertson’s highlighting America’s religious heritage.

Lawmakers in at least nine states are following Texas’ lead. The legislatures in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Virginia have passed measures authorizing student-initiated prayer at school events, and similar bills are pending in Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

The U.S. Senate also debated long into the night last month over an amendment sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to shield “constitutionally protected prayer” in the schools. In the end, the Senate and House agreed only on a watered-down provision that would bar schools from using federal funds to stop “voluntary prayer” at school.

The latest burst of activity stems from last year’s ruling by the federal appeals court based in New Orleans.

“A majority of students can do what the state, acting on its own, cannot do to incorporate prayer in the public school high school graduation ceremonies,” wrote Judge Thomas Reavley of Austin in upholding a prayer at a suburban Houston high school.

That ruling seemed to rub against the grain of more than three decades of Supreme Court decisions prohibiting official school prayers, daily Bible readings, the teaching of creationism, a state-mandated moment of silence for voluntary prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments.

Yet the Supreme Court last June refused to review the appeals court’s decision.

That same month, a federal judge in Boise, Ida.--citing the Texas decision--upheld the students’ right to have a graduation prayer. A day later, however, a federal judge in Virginia blocked a planned graduation prayer in Loudon County, ruling that the Constitution did not permit “students by a majority vote to impose a prayer on the minority.”

Religious-rights advocates heralded the Texas decision as a landmark in the law governing religion and public education.

Jay A. Sekulow, chief counsel of Robertson’s law and justice center--a public policy law firm based in Virginia Beach, Va.--threatened to send “legal SWAT teams” to communities that blocked a prayer or “censored” its contents.

On the other side, the ACLU accused the “extreme right” of distorting the law and pressuring schools to permit prayer again.

“This is an incredibly well-coordinated campaign,” said Phil Gutis, an ACLU official in New York. “They can talk about this being led by students, but the religious right is spending millions of dollars to reintroduce prayer into the schools.”

The back-and-forth has often resulted in murkiness for school boards, students and parents, who are not sure what they may do, if anything. When they do venture into the legal thicket, they often end up with bland recitations that satisfy no one and hardly qualify as prayers.

“This has caused a horrible mess,” said Gwendolyn Gregory, deputy general counsel for the National School Boards Assn. in Alexandria, Va. “They don’t know who to believe. They get these missives from the ACLU and the ACLJ, and they are totally contradictory.”

Baylor University law professor David Guinn, asked last spring to advise school districts in central Texas, found board members torn by conflicting pressures.

“These are fine, sweet, bewildered laymen who say: ‘Tell us what to do,’ ” Guinn said. “One side says they’ll sue if you have prayer, and the other side says they’ll sue if you don’t have prayer.”

So what did he advise? Guinn said he urged caution. “If it’s a religious exercise in the public schools, I still think it’s unconstitutional,” he said. “It’s also a charade to say all this is initiated voluntarily by the students.”

A few legal points are not in dispute. At one extreme, organized prayers in the classroom are forbidden. At the other, courts have recently decided that students may meet on campus in Bible study groups.

But in between, the rules are not as clear. As late as June, 1992, the Supreme Court in the case of Lee vs. Weisman ruled that the school district in Providence, R.I., had violated the Constitution by inviting a cleric to deliver a graduation prayer.

However, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, said a student-initiated prayer was another matter.

That decision had an immediate impact in Round Rock, and it shows that prayer remains a powerful symbol, one that can quickly split a community. Round Rock’s sprawling school district stretches out to include the fast-growing suburbs north of Austin, but its center remains a conservative small town where, until a few years ago, prayer at Friday night football games was an unquestioned tradition.

Within just a few weeks, the fight over a graduation prayer overturned the school board, led to the superintendent’s ouster and drove a wedge between Christian activists who sought prayer and Jewish parents and others who opposed it. In the end, the graduation day exercises left both sides unhappy.

It began in April of last year when three seniors at Westwood High School told their principal they wanted a prayer at their graduation.

But veteran Schools Supt. Dan McLendon had recently issued a directive to principals that prohibited prayer over the public address system at football games and other school events.

“It wasn’t that I’m opposed to prayer. I’m a ‘born-again’ Christian,” McLendon said in an interview. But the district’s lawyers, citing the Supreme Court ruling in the Providence case, said the school Administration should not be involved in promoting prayer.

Christian activists took offense at the superintendent’s no-prayer dictum, and three local leaders declared their candidacy for the school board. Citing the appeals court decision in the Houston case that sanctioned student-initiated prayer, they won an easy victory last May.

“This is a right of the students. I see it as a matter of freedom of expression and freedom of religion,” said Kathy Seay, a newly elected board member.

After a raucous public meeting, the new board majority passed a resolution authorizing student prayers based on a majority vote. At Westwood High, the seniors met in an assembly and, with little discussion, voted in favor of a graduation prayer.

But it remained unclear whether the prayer could be explicitly religious. The Texas case, Jones vs. Clear Creek, spoke of a “non-sectarian, non-proselytizing prayer,” but that limitation has spawned new litigation elsewhere in Texas.

In McAllen, for example, Schools Supt. Jose Lopez announced that students could refer to a “neutral deity” such as “Lord, God, father, etc.” but they could not make “specific references to Jesus Christ, Mohammed, etc.”

Several students said they wanted to pray “in the name of Jesus,” and they went to court aided by a lawyer furnished by the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville, Va., group that champions religious liberty. Its lawyers have been especially active in Texas defending student-initiated prayers and on-campus Bible clubs.

“We have 22 lawsuits under way just in Texas,” said Kelly Shackelford, a regional coordinator in Dallas.

In the McAllen lawsuit, the students said that “as one of their normal religious tenets, when they pray . . . they sincerely believe that their religious faith compels prayer in the name of Jesus.”

Three months ago, a federal judge rejected their claim, but the Rutherford Institute is taking the issue to the 5th Circuit Court.

That controversy raises a second question: Who must assure that the student prayer is not “sectarian” or “proselytizing”?

At Westwood High, principal Linda Watkins said she was advised to “edit” the prayer written by the three students, although she felt uncomfortable doing so.

“This was my first experience with this issue,” she said. “So I talked to our attorney. I was told it shouldn’t say anything about ‘Our Heavenly Father,’ ” she said.

“The general feeling is that the prayer has to be pretty innocuous,” said Pat Ahearn, director of legal services for the Texas Assn. of School Boards. “Maybe it can mention God. Maybe not.”

And what about the minority of students who do not want a prayer?

Watkins says she was concerned about the 99 seniors who voted no. “That number tells me there was significant opposition,” she said.

But Seay, the board member, was more worried about the 379 who voted yes. “In a democracy, the majority rules. Over the last 30 years, I think we have sort of turned that around so that the minority rules.”

The Supreme Court failed to resolve that dispute, but its last written opinion on the issue focused on the rights of dissenting students in Providence. Its author, as well as the pivotal vote in the case, was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

An appointee of President Ronald Reagan, Kennedy had earlier voiced support for religion’s role in public education, but he swung the other way in the Providence case. He concluded that a non-religious student should not be forced to hear a religious message as a condition of receiving her diploma.

“What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the state to enforce a religious orthodoxy,” Kennedy wrote for the 5-4 majority that struck down graduation prayer in Providence. “The Constitution forbids the state to exact religious conformity from a student as the price of attending her high school graduation.”

Kennedy’s powerful affirmation of the separation of church and state reportedly stunned several of his conservative colleagues. A few months later, when the appeal arrived contesting the student-initiated prayer in Houston, neither the conservative nor the liberal faction at the high court could count on mustering a majority. Instead, the justices agreed only to put off the issue until later.

That leaves Round Rock one of many communities grasping for direction. Carlos Higgins, a former school board member, said the graduation prayer issue “has divided this community and encouraged conflict among neighbors. There are nine of them up there (at the Supreme Court), so they can’t have a tie vote. I’m disappointed they didn’t decide this one way or the other.”

With no clear direction from the high court, the student prayer went ahead as scheduled at last year’s June graduation at Westwood High, but only after lawyers for the ACLU approved it. In an unusual arrangement, the school district’s lawyer faxed a copy of a student’s prayer to the ACLU office in Austin a few days before graduation. Satisfied all religious references from the prayer had been deleted, the ACLU dropped a last-minute legal effort to block it.

“It was so watered down that I wouldn’t call it a prayer,” said ACLU attorney Patrick Wiseman. “There was not even an ‘amen.’ It was more like a statement.”

Nonetheless, the new school board members arrived at the Westwood graduation pleased that they had at least stood up for the students’ right to free speech. Even that victory proved a mixed blessing.

After one senior delivered the brief, non-religious invocation, the board members stood grim-faced as the class valedictorian arose and denounced the board for pushing a “right-wing agenda.”

“What I told them was that this is the first step on the slippery slope toward bringing back prayer in school,” said Abhi Shellat, now a freshman at Harvard University. “If the prayer offended one person in the class, then we shouldn’t have had it.”