Release Time Religious Instruction: Unpacking the LifeWise Academy Controversy

[0:01] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. Recently, I was invited by a local Unitarian church to give a presentation about Release Time Religious Instruction in Ohio, and LifeWise Academy specifically. I explain what RTRI is and why LifeWise is a problem for Ohio public schools, and I offer suggestions of what people can do to address these problems. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:41] Music. I’ll see you next time. Welcome to the Glass City Humanist.

[1:02] My name is Doug, and I am your host. And I have a special treat for listeners today. Back on October the 20th, I was invited to give a presentation at First Unitarian Church of Toledo on Glendale Avenue to talk about LifeWise Academy and release time religious instruction here in Ohio. This is a particular issue with me, with our group. For us, for Sholi, for the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, we believe it’s a church and state issue. Unfortunately, with the privileging that a lot of dominant religions get in this country, of course, it’s legal. It’s not ethical, but it’s legal. And in particular, LifeWise Academy is not a very good ally of public schools. In fact, as I’ve mentioned previously on episodes of the podcast, the founder, Joel Penton, he believes that a public school is his mission field, and he wants to turn public schools into religiously-centered schools. Now, some parents appreciate that.

[2:17] Other parents do not. And I just think it’s the height of arrogance for a religious person to believe that foisting their religion on other people is actually a good thing, and it’s not. The way that we work with humanism is if you self-identify as a humanist, and you have a consensus with us, and you agree with our values, then we welcome you. If you don’t want to do that, then we, that’s fine with us too. You can go about your merry way, as the saying goes.

[2:56] You know, like Jefferson used to say, it doesn’t pick our pocket if you are religious. Now, Joel Penton and the LifeWise Academy people and the people that support them, they are dangerous to public education because they want to subvert the common good that a public school is supposed to give us and interrupt and disrupt the school day so that kids can go and learn about Jesus and have a Bible school in the middle of the day.

[3:29] And if parents want their kids to do that, there are plenty of religious schools in the country. There’s plenty of religious schools in Lucas County. They’re more than free to put their kids in. And especially with the free vouchers that the state of Ohio has given you, it shouldn’t cost you anything to do that. And leave the public schools for the rest of us, where we know that it’s a public good and it’s something that, you know, we want taxpayer dollars to pay for common schools. We don’t want taxpayer dollars paying for religious education. And so, with that in mind, this is the presentation I gave about LifeWise. I’m going to have this audio with the slides that I used up on our YouTube channel soon for the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie’s YouTube channel, and you can check there, and it should be available soon.

[4:29] So, on to the presentation. The.

[4:34] Music.

[4:41] All right. How many people know what LifeWise Academy is or have heard of it? All right. Well, basically, it is a release time religious instruction program where they take kids out of school in the middle of the school day to supposedly teach them character building and using Bible stories.

[5:04] And the reason why it’s a problem is because it’s in the middle of the school day. And so today I’m going to talk about Release Time Religious Instruction in Ohio and LifeWise specifically because they’re the ones that are most known for using that law. All right, so our objectives today is define what release time religious instruction is and the legal aspects, and I’m going to be using RTRI as a shortened version, so I don’t have to keep saying that all the time. I’ll introduce LifeWise Academy and its founder, Joel Penton, and discuss the issues with LifeWise in public schools in Ohio and find out what we can do to control how groups like LifeWise operate, if not stop them completely from disrupting the school day. Now, while I will talk a lot about LifeWise, my group, Shole, we oppose release time religious instruction on church-state grounds, but it is legal in the United States. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Christian or another religion, or even if it’s non-religious. We think that RTRI programs disrupt the school day and does not contribute to the education process.

[6:19] You can oppose release time programs and be religious. It doesn’t change your beliefs or force you to change your beliefs. And unlike Unlike what the LifeWise supporters say, this is not a freedom of religion issue. It is a time, man, or place issue, and it’s also a political issue that’s related to Christian nationalism. I’m sorry, did you have a question?

[6:48] What part? Oh, time, manner, place. Usually you can regulate like First Amendment based on time, manner, place, what time it is, how you do it, and where it takes place. Release time religious instruction, RTRI, is when a parent’s, with a parent’s permission, public school children attend a religious class during a school day. We’ve had it since 1948, and since 1952, it can happen off-campus with no tax funds. There are religious programs that meet before or after school. Those aren’t considered RTRI programs, and that includes Campus Crusade for Christ, which they call themselves CREW now, Athletes in Action, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and good news clubs, because those type of groups, they meet before and after school. So there are two U.S. Supreme Court cases that cover this. The first one is McCollum v. Board of Education. That’s the one that disallowed public schools from having religious classes in the school during the school day. My mom, she is 80 years old, and she used to tell me they used to have to go to a Bible class when she went to elementary school.

[8:04] The second case is Zorak v. Clausen, and this was a court case that decided that if it happened on campus and didn’t involve taxpayer funds, that it did not violate the First Amendment. And this is the Supreme Court decision that LifeWise likes to promote because it supports their position. And then these are the set up in Zorak v. Kloss and how, why a RTI program would be legal. Parents have to give their permission. It’s held off school grounds. It’s voluntary. That’s another point that they like to stress when they’re promoting it to schools. No expenditure of public funds and no district staff is allowed to oppose, support, or teach the class. There are a certain number of hours that students must be in class in the state of Ohio. I suspect it’s similar to 10 other states as well. How is that affected by the release time in school? Well, it’s specifically addressed that it’s not considered an absence. So it doesn’t penalize the student for missing class time.

[9:20] Right, right. And in Ohio, the law is set up that high school students can also receive class credit for taking a Bible class. Yeah.

[9:33] No, they still have to leave school, but they can still count it towards their credits they need to graduate. And this is the Ohio Revised Code. This was adopted in 2014. It pretty much states everything that Zorak v. Clausen did. It says the student assumes responsibility for any missed class schoolwork. The sponsoring entity makes provisions for and assumes liability for the student. Transportation is completely up to the sponsoring entity. And they also have to maintain attendance records and make them available to the school district. Because you could have a kid go to a LifeWise program and not show up and skip school or whatever. So that’s what they want to keep track of. And then the other important point is that this law states that school districts may have a policy. They don’t all have to have one right now, and even if they don’t, parents can still take kids out of school to go to a religious observance. Most school districts have a policy about that already. And they just passed one recently where they give three excused absences for religious observances. So is this also for Muslim students and Hindu? Well, you would think so, yeah.

[11:00] It probably wouldn’t be. I’m assuming that if a Muslim group came up with a program to take kids out of school, there would be a lot of opposition to it, I’m pretty sure, especially in some of these rural schools. So this Ohio Revised Code was introduced in 2014 by Representative Bill Patman from the Cleveland area. He was concerned that children in public schools were being punished for using religion in their assignments, like book reports and art projects. It really wasn’t the case. During that time, there was maybe one or two anecdotal cases of a child not being allowed. I believe one of the cases was he wanted to write a book report about the Bible, and the teacher said no.

[11:41] So that’s why Bill Patman wanted to do this. It was known as House Bill 171, and again, it would allow high school students to obtain course credit. And the important thing is this law was never meant to allow for the mass movement of young kids off campus for Bible class. This was an individual, it was applied to the individual people to go to. And kind of like when I was going in high school, my friends would go to mass on Ash Wednesday. And then they would come home, come back to school with the ash on their foreheads, and they wouldn’t get in trouble for leaving school. And that’s kind of what this law is supposed to help with. LifeWise Academy was founded in 2018 by Joel Penton. That’s his picture. Is he from David? No, he’s from the Van Wert area. That’s where he grew up. He played football at Ohio State. He was a linebacker. And he became a pastor after he left school. Founded a ministry called Stand for Truth. And he’d have these fake school assemblies where they would have a mandatory school assembly where he would talk about character and then invite the kids to a concert the next day or two off campus or after school. And then it would turn into a church service. So he has a history of doing these types of things.

[13:07] He adapted the RTRI program known as LifeWise from a program that had been operating in Van Wert since 2012.

[13:18] And then as of 2024, more than 30,000 public school students are enrolled in the program all over the country. And that’s their goal. Their goal is to be national. And it says the stated goal of LifeWise is to reach unchurched children in public

[13:35] schools and turn the schools into religious schools and have a Bible-based education. That is his goal. He said it in books and interviews. Oh, in his personal life? Yeah, the main thing that we have taught, the groups that I’m associated with, like Parents Against LifeWise and everything, they’ve talked to friends that went to school with him in Van Wert, and everything that he wrote in his book was not true. Yeah, he’s hiding something. And he’s making a lot of money. All right. So some of the problems we have with LifeWise Academy is it lacks transparency. They refuse to operate before or after school. They’ve actually told school districts, if you don’t let us operate during the school day, we won’t operate. Well, yeah, right.

[14:29] It doesn’t conduct the same background checks as school districts do for teachers. They use like a church-based or religious-based credit check. Usually it’s about a credit check. The law is clear that there is supposed to be no support from public school districts, yet we have many cases where that is happening. One school district included LifeWise in their computer system. It receives a million dollars in grants and donations, yet require local groups to fundraise to operate the school. They have to pay, I think it’s something like $300 per student back to headquarters. The local groups that establish the programs. That’s how the model works, is the local groups establish the program, the national gives them a curriculum, liability insurance, and the teachers, trains the teachers. And then they have to kick back some of that money. And if they don’t raise enough money, they can pull their support from it. And as I said, they’re supported by several groups involved with Project 2025. And the theology that they teach is from the Southern Baptist Convention.

[15:53] The curriculum itself is published by the Southern Baptist Convention that they then put their name on it. And then that graphic there, concerns about House Bill 445, I’ll mention a little bit more, but that kind of summarizes some of the issues that we have with them. They also have some shady dealings. They tell prospective school districts that everyone wants life-wise,

[16:18] which isn’t the case. It’s usually not everyone. It’s a core. Maybe 10% of the people probably want it. They cite a marketing study they paid for and based on cherry-picked data to prove that their program is successful.

[16:34] They don’t vet the signatures on their website petitions. You can go pick your school and put your email in saying that you want to have a LifeWise program, and they don’t vet that you’re actually in that district. So there’s cases, we’ve proven there’s cases where they’ve had petitions that were signed by, like, say, church groups from outside the district. They pressure and intimidate school district personnel who oppose them. They take them to lunch. They take a superintendent to lunch. The superintendent says, I’m sorry, I’m not going to support you. And then they say, well, do you want any of your school levies to pass ever again? And they also use state elected officials to promote them to the districts. They try to bribe them, yeah. And then they do that with the state elected officials. John Husted pressured the board president in Hilliard to accept LifeWise. Josh Williams, here in the Toledo area, has gotten involved with the Sylvania District. Parents that want LifeWise, and Sylvania blocked it. What about Perrysburg? Do we know? Perrysburg has one that’s operating right now. And they’ve been promoting, yeah, it’s been a couple of years now that they’ve had one. Yeah.

[17:55] I have all kinds of questions. I’ll wait. Okay. No, that’s okay. That’s okay. All right. So then the other problems is they teach young children extreme versions of Christianity. And I have an example of that here coming up. They don’t have to abide by students’ ISPs. Those are done for like disabled students or students who struggle. They don’t have to accept all children who want to attend. And they use the school to pressure children who miss time at LifeWise. So they’ll send an email to the principal saying, hey, Joe Schmoe hasn’t attended in a couple weeks. Could you get him on the bus?

[18:36] And then they use candy and other favors to lure classmates who don’t attend. They send them back to school with this candy and fun stuff and make the kids jealous.

[18:47] And LifeWise conflicts with the purpose of the public schools. This is some of the troubling information in their teacher handbook about gender identity. They say God created male and female equally and distinctly. Sexual orientation, God designed a man and a woman, and that they should only have relationships, man and women. And sex before marriage is against God. So that’s some of the stuff that they teach the teachers. And in this one, it says, When faced with a choice to obey God or our parents, we should always obey God first. That’s what they tell the kids. And it’s kind of ironic coming from many of these people that are all about parents’ rights, and then they have a program teaching their kids that it’s God first. And then here’s an example of the curriculum, which they really don’t let you view it. They don’t let parents go through it ahead of time. This was a lesson on sacrifice, a character lesson on sacrifice, and they used the story of Jacob murdering his son. At an altar, and God steps in at the last minute before Jacob murders his son.

[20:05] And this is geared towards kindergarten through third grade. These are little kids being taught that human sacrifice is okay as long as God thinks it’s okay. And then we also have some clergy that disagree with the teachings of LifeWise. Some Catholic and Jewish clergy oppose it because it isn’t the correct religion. It’s not their version.

[20:28] And at least for Catholics, with their theology, also some more extreme evangelicals oppose it, because life-wise isn’t conservative enough. So, you know, we have some priests and Catholic priests telling their parishioners not to enroll their children, and Jewish rabbis are saying the same thing. And then we have, like, the really extreme Christians saying, don’t get involved. LifeWise tries to come across as non-denominational and generic, and it’s not. So, I’m going to talk about protecting the public schools. One of the main things is pay attention, check your board agendas, and attend meetings.

[21:14] Join like-minded people that oppose these programs, like Parents Against LifeWise, and there’s some local groups in different districts. Encourage districts to revise or rescind their RTRI policy if they have one, because right now they can. House Bill 445, which is under consideration, and in Senate Bill 293, would change the law and require school districts to have a policy. And we expect them to try to pass it during the lame duck session after the election.

[21:49] We also have a toolkit that was developed by Honesty for Ohio Education that you can use, and I have links coming up on that. And document any violations of the law that you see or hear or witness yourself and complain to the district or to the state. Are they in Toledo right now?

[22:12] Toledo Public used to have a program at, I think it was Birmingham Elementary, but I don’t think I, last time I checked, it’s not active. Perrysburg has one. Anthony Wayne has one. Mommy does not yet. But if you go to, yeah, there’s a map, Respect Our Schools has a map where it marks where the different programs are and what their, what status they have at that time. And so if there must be an RTRI policy, make sure it has guardrails. Right now, the law, the current law has no, it’s vague. It’s, you know, like I said, it’s got like five or six points about money and liability. But if it has to have a policy, it should have some guardrails. A couple of things, the Toledo Public Schools just revised theirs where they decide where they consider all classes core classes. According to the law, you can’t skip core classes. And so we have some districts that were having it during art, during gym.

[23:25] Now many districts are adopting core classes as all classes, so that limits life-wise to lunch and recess.

[23:36] Also require the same level background checks that teachers have to have. Require that the program happens before or after school, but then it’s not an RTRA program, but you can force that. There’s a Yeah, school district could force that. Require that students can only be released to a parent or guardian each time they attend. Because right now, it’s all the kids are herded onto a bus and taken off campus. Require that the program accept all students who have permission to attend and that students can opt out with or without a parent’s permission. And then prohibit the RTRI program from giving students gifts or candy to bring back to school to prevent bullying. So those are some of the things that can be added to it. And then here’s some links. You can go to our website, humanistwle.org. And I have an FAQ on the page there. And then Honesty for Ohio Education, Parents Against LifeWise is a good group.

[24:43] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[24:58] Questions? Where are the places that the kids are being bused to? I mean, what kind of facilities? Well, it depends. It depends on the district and their involvement, the involvement from the evangelicals in their community. Generally, it’s a church, a nearby church. There’s a lot of churches that are next door to public schools, and some of those churches host the programs. In Lima, they actually bought a house next door to a school and turned it into a LifeWise Academy building. And that’s run by the people that run the TV station down there, the religious TV station. Yes? How have you, is part of your process making sure to contact media around the state to, you know, ask them to do story. Yes. I know Parents Against LifeWise does. They just had a protest yesterday in Hilliard.

[26:08] LifeWise’s headquarters is in Hilliard, and that’s where they protested. And I know the protests that they had a couple of months ago made the news. And there’s been Westerville School District rescinded, so that got a lot of press. They had a couple hundred people show up for the school board meetings. Stowe, Monroe Falls, they recently voted to rescind their policy. So they had a lot of publicity. Anytime that they go against LifeWise, they get a lot of publicity. Well, and then I also wonder, like Perrysburg superintendent is really, really good. And I used to be the editor for the Perrysburg newspaper and went to the school board meetings. and there was a lot of pressure from parents to do this and that. And he was really good about not just caving. So what had to happen for him to agree?

[27:03] Well, the thing is, the law states that a school may have a policy. The law had been sitting on the books for 10 years, and a lot of these school districts use a school board platform that has policies and agendas and things that they keep. And this group that maintains it did a boilerplate policy. And so many school districts adopted it. It was basically just a restated version of the Ohio law, and they put it in their policy. Because every school district every year goes through and looks at policies to revise and remove or change or add, and that’s what happened in many of these cases. And so a lot of these school districts, and that’s the other thing, too, is LifeWise pops up.

[28:01] They do everything behind the scenes, and then they show up one day and they say, hey, we have this many people that want to do this. Let’s do it. And so we’re trying to be proactive and get a lot of these schools to get this changed. So if the state law changes or if LifeWise pops up, then they’re able to address some of the issues. Are they using buses, school buses? Not school buses. They’re not allowed to use school buses, but that is one thing that they get their local groups to fundraise, is to buy a bus. And then they paint it red and put the LifeWise label on it. And then sometimes they’ll park it in front of the school. Yes. They’re really insinuated as the Eastwood School in Pemberville and Lucky. They have the buses. I was really disgusted to find out that, you know, in addition to getting into our tax-supported schools, and by the way, Eastwood has an income tax and a property tax. It’s very pricey.

[29:06] The library, which is publicly funded separate legey, separate covering, was having a program and sometime or another life-wise insinuated itself also providing one carpool transportation, to a historic cemetery locked down in the Eastwood District.

[29:26] So like they’re really meshing themselves into the fabric of the community and really need to be aware. Have we talked about the map? He accessed a map online in the state of Ohio that shows where they’re at in school districts and Northwest One House Berry.

[29:46] How much time has taken up during the school day for these programs? Anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, probably once a week. Some school districts have it twice a week because they have many more students that attend. So they have to do a split shift. And the other important point, too, is the kids that don’t attend usually get stuck in a room doing busy work. They don’t do any fresh schoolwork because they don’t want the LifeWise kids to miss anything, even though they’re responsible for making up the schoolwork. But the schools accommodate them that way. So when LifeWise is approaching a school district, do they do this by engaging parents and the parents go to the district rather than LifeWise Academy? Well, right. What they do is they form a local committee.

[30:47] They have steps. They have 10 steps. LifeWise does. And so they’ll form a local committee. They’ll start raising money. They’ll do those petitions online. And then once they reach a certain step, then they go and introduce themselves to the school district. And sometimes they’ll have a representative from LifeWise with them to answer any questions that are raised. And at that point, they’ll also be working from local congregations. Right. Local churches, that’s what they try to do anyway. Yes. And they also assume before they approach parents, et cetera, they have to instill fear in people, as in if teachers are teaching children to become transgender or gay or whatever. They have to drum all that stuff up, right? Right, right. That’s part of their message, I would have said. Yeah, they think that the kids aren’t getting the proper moral education in school and that only LifeWise can do that. And that’s why they call it character building, Even though that’s just kind of a wallpaper they put over the extremist theology that they actually teach.

[32:12] How is this impacting the future of science in schools? I would imagine that somebody with this theological agenda would be anti-economy machine freaking out.

[32:25] Yeah, they don’t, they actually don’t get into any science or anything like that. They don’t deal with that. They only stick with character stuff like sacrifice, subservience, love, you know, different things. That’s pretty much all they teach in LifeWise. But they do have a statement of faith, and the statement of faith is pretty conservative. So I’m assuming that there’s probably many members who oppose evolution. But this is Respect Our Schools. This is Keith Comer developed this project where he talks about the same stuff I’ve been talking about. And then he has a map here. Let me bring up the map. But basically, it’s color-coded based on the step. Step 10 is when they’re getting ready to start the program. Step 1 is when they start getting people together who want to do it.

[33:27] And then we’ll go over here. But here’s Northwest Ohio. And all the ones that have red all have active programs. And there’s Delta and Wauseon and Archibald and Napoleon. Defiance has a big one, big program. Perrysburg has one. And then there’s some more that are like Rossford. Rossford is close. Bowling Green blocked it recently within the last year. And Sylvania blocked it just recently as well. And I wrote letter, I live near Sevania, so I wrote emails to the school board. What’s the other black one to the, in the middle? No, it’s blue. Yeah, that is. That’s Toledo City School. But like I said, they don’t have an active program right now. I did check, I contacted Toledo Public Schools and they said they don’t have an active one. But they have had one in the past. Yeah.

[34:39] These are all places where they’ve started collecting signatures and everything. So I got not a bit here for all of the presentation. Has Romulus Durant made any statement about LifeWise Academy? I know that he is a strong religious person, and the ombudsman of Toledo Public Schools is a Baptist minister. So, yeah, I haven’t asked to see if they had any. All I know is that the school board did revise their policy recently. So he would have known about that. But I don’t, unless I check the minutes, if he made any comments about it, I’m not sure.

[35:33] So these local groups, when you say local group, you’re talking about local life-wise groups. Right, right. And those are groups of people that have an interest in getting this into school. So are they mostly parents? Are they recruited by LifeWise? I mean, how do people get it? Yeah, both. Yeah, they’ll make a presentation or something to a church.

[36:01] And then some of the church members will get together and say, hey, let’s put this in our school. And then they’ll talk to their friends and family. And they’ll form a committee. Usually it starts with a committee, and then they go through the whole process. Joel Penton calls it McDonaldizing religion, and so it’s all plug and play. And so they get this book with all the steps, including examples of emails to send and who to talk to, how to fundraise, everything. People know from the get-go how fundamentalist it is or whether they’re sort of seduced into thinking it’s character building and maybe not. Yeah, it’s, it’s right. It’s.

[36:48] Like I said, they try to portray themselves as non-denominational and safe. They call it being safe. They don’t take any extreme positions, but they do. And a lot of places where this has taken hold is the rural communities where they have strong religious beliefs. And so they don’t question it.

[37:09] Do they do this in high school too? Yeah, they’re moving into high school. So Pandora Gilboa down in Putman County, they have a high school program now. My question is this. I remember being a teenager.

[37:25] And it seems to me if I had a choice between this or if I had a choice between if other groups would just follow behind them and join like a covenant of witches or something like that. I, as a teenager, just because I would join one of those other groups just to oppose my parents and stuff. So the problem isn’t really so much them, which is a problem, but giving the kids a choice that they would rather do.

[38:06] Yeah, I know this satanic temple has a LifeWise-like program for people that want to put it in their schools to oppose LifeWise or any other religious-based group. But a lot of times, though, you do that—anytime that you do that where you try to put something in that’s opposite of what the conventional wisdom is, then they’ll oppose it, and then they’ll take it away from everybody. Yes. If this House Bill 445 passes and all districts are required to have a policy, it’s going to open it up to any group that is able to create a program and has the enthusiasm and the energy to do it. And the school district will not be able to stop them. They have to accommodate them. If it’s required, they’ll have to accommodate them. And the other groups, which is, this is good enough, the resources that a cluster of evangelical churches are. Oh, and then also, I also forgot another point about LifeWise is a lot of people claim that it looks like a multi-level marketing program where you try to bring in as many people as possible and they have to pay money and it gets trickled down to the people in charge.

[39:28] Yeah, kind of like Amway. Does Mr. Penning disclose his income? He does not, but they do file a 990. And the last time I looked at it, his pay was like $200,000 a year. And they went from just a little bit above a million dollars to six million dollars in income in one year. And a lot of that is from groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation, and he’s been on Focus on the Family shows. In fact, LifeWise sponsored the Moms for Liberty conference that was in Philadelphia this couple months ago. And that right there is a red flag for me. Even if I believe that they were a non-denominational generic religion, just the fact that they’re associated with Moms for Liberty, I’m like, no, they’re not coming into the school. I’m sorry. Any other questions? I’ve read that the kids come back from the programs and tell their friends they can’t be friends anymore because they’re going to hell.

[40:49] Do they all say that to Catholics and some of the other? Yeah, they probably do. Really front and center, I think. Yeah, we have a lot of reports. What I do, like the people I work with, Honesty for Ohio Education, is we do public records requests. And so we get all the emails. And so a lot of that comes out. Bullying, problem children. When there’s a child that has behavioral problems, they get rid of them. They shunt them back to school. And there was another one, a child needed an aid to function at school, and the aid was not allowed to go with him to LifeWise. So they got an eight-year-old to be his aid at life-wise.

[41:44] And, and the people were not happy about that. Their parents was not happy about that. Yeah. And I’m like thinking, well, how much does that kid really get in, into it if he has a learning disabilities and things like that, you know, but it’s all about the fun. I mean, to be honest, when I was a kid, the only part about, uh, uh, going to church that I liked was Sunday school. That was the only thing because you got to make stuff and got you got cookies and that’s what they use. That’s what they use to get the kids to come to that class. That’s what we do. Yeah. Right. All right. I know down in Finley, I just read recently that one of the local churches, evangelical churches, started a program of their own that’s not life wise. But they’re getting in on the act because Finley has a policy and they have a couple of active schools.

[42:39] Um, Bigelow Hill and, uh, Wilson Vance, I think just started or hasn’t started yet, but, and Van Buren has it and Liberty Benton. Liberty Benton, the, the host church is just across the street and they have, uh, like 50 kids that come. Could you restate the legislation 445 again, so we understand clearly what they’re doing. Right. The proposed law, House Bill 445, and the Senate version of it changes one word in the law. It changes it from a school district may have a policy to a school district shall have a policy. That’s the only change it makes. And when we had a proponent testimony for it in the spring, it was pointed out that it doesn’t address any of the concerns. It doesn’t address liability.

[43:35] That was a thing about Westerville. The reason why Westerville rescinded was because of liability. And what it was is that LifeWise would have parents sign a liability waiver. Well, they’re not allowed to do that because they have to assume liability. They were giving it back to the parents. So if something happened at LifeWise to their child, it wasn’t their fault. Yeah. So they’re not allowed to do that. The other thing that came up with Westerville was school lunches. The United States Department of Agriculture that gives money to schools for school lunches says, LifeWise, it’s not a school function. It can’t get reimbursed for lunches. Well, a lot of these school districts, they have LifeWise during lunch, and they were making lunches for the kids.

[44:24] Well, the state came in and said, well, we’ll reimburse you.

[44:29] And and I have a public records request out for that to find out how that decision was made, because it was done pretty quickly. Once Westerville started considering it, then the state changed the rules. So the state is funding. Yeah. So it is. Mm hmm. Right. Right. Because, I mean, it’s pretty clear no tax dollars can be spent to support to support it. I think having teachers round up the kids to get to the bus is using school funds because that’s time a teacher is being taken away from classwork. Yeah, there’s quite a few. And unfortunately, a lot of teachers can’t say anything because they fear for their jobs. We’ve been looking for teachers that want to go on the record. There’s been a few, but a lot of times they can’t because especially in the rural communities. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. And, you know, check out our website, check out Respect Public Schools and all that stuff if you want more information. Thank you for listening.

[45:37] For more information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie. Sholee can be reached at humanistswle.org. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio. See you next time!

[46:17] Music.