Obstacles to Learning

Obstacles to Learning

No Skullcaps Allowed: Religion in the Schools

The U.S. Constitution requires that church and state stay separate, but many Jews during the last century found that the two blended together in North Carolina schools. Often the school day began with Christian prayers and Bible readings. At assemblies, Christian hymns were sung or preachers delivered inspirational sermons. Schools had Christmas trees and pageants, and some Jewish students recall teachers telling them that they could not be saved or that their beliefs were plain wrong.

Skullcap Banned from High School

When fourteen-year-old Brad Seelig wore a yarmulke (skull cap) to Cary’s Green Hope High School in 2006, the assistant principal took him aside and told him he “needed Jesus in his life.” Fellow students said he was going to hell. Seelig decided to wear a baseball cap over the yarmulke, but the school suspended him for violating its head-covering policy. Eventually, the school allowed Brad’s family to purchase school-approved caps to wear over the yarmulke.

Coping as a Religious Minority

• “We did have Christian prayers and Bible readings in school. I always felt that I was being left out, but I managed it by just keeping my eyes open. It was like I wasn’t praying that prayer if I didn’t close my eyes,” remembered Muriel Offerman from Wallace.

• In Durham in the early 1960s, Robbie Schultz’s teacher began each day with a Bible story. “My teacher read the New Testament,” he recalled. “She looked at me and said, ‘You only think you’re right, but we know we’re right.'”

• “When I was in second grade,” remembered Leonard Kaplan of High Point, “we were having a Christmas play, and I was very little, so they designated me to be baby Jesus, the lead role. I came home all excited and told my father, ‘Guess what? I got the lead role! I’m going to be baby Jesus!’ He said, ‘You’re not going to be baby Jesus.’ So I went back the next day to tell the teacher I couldn’t be baby Jesus.”