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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Jeffery L. Williams found Jesus through his public middle school.
Now the pastor of Golden View Baptist Church in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, Williams grew up in an unchurched household. As an elementary school student, he lived with his single mother and two brothers in a low-income housing project.
“Mom raised us in the hood, in the ghetto,” said Williams, who will celebrate his 39th birthday next week. “And then she moved us out of the projects … trying to get us a better life.”
That move landed Williams at Greenville’s Tanglewood Middle School, where the preteen boy heard about a weekly “released time” Bible education program that bused students off campus during regular school hours.
“I came into released time by happenstance, thinking that it was like a free period,” he recalled. “And Mom signed me up for it. The impact it had on my life? It changed my life actually. ”
Religion in public schools keeps making national headlines — from Louisiana requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom to Oklahoma’s top education official ordering schools to incorporate the Bible into lessons.
Add to that expanding school voucher programs, which are pumping billions in taxpayer dollars into religious schools across the U.S. and blurring the line between public education and religion.
Released time classes — in which students are released during the school day for a short period, with parental consent, to receive religious instruction — are less well known.
But they, too, have gained legislative attention recently.
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Photo by Bobby Ross Jr.
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