COLUMBUS, Ohio — All Ohio public schools must reasonably accommodate a student’s sincerely held religious beliefs and practices under a new Ohio law, which includes granting students up to three excused absences for religious expression days per year.
The bill, known as the “Religious Expression Days Act,” was signed into law by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and will go into effect on Oct. 20.
Along with the reasonable accommodation requirement, H.B. 214 also prohibits Ohio’s public schools from soliciting or requiring students, faculty or prospective employees to commit to specific beliefs, affiliations, ideals or principles concerning political movements, which was the original intent behind the bill when it was introduced to the House.
Throughout the Statehouse deliberations on H.B. 214, Republican backers have viewed it as a necessary guardrail for public schools in an increasingly political age.
“Unfortunately, Ohio’s recent political climate has raised concerns that Ohio’s K-12 public school teachers, staff and students may face negative consequences for expressing certain political perspectives or failing to conform to specific ideological viewpoints,” said bill sponsor and Muskingum County Rep. Adam Holmes, R-Nashport, when the bill first passed the House in November.
However, Democrats have largely rebuffed the bill as unnecessary, given that Ohio’s teaching licensure code of conduct, which teachers must follow in order to maintain their license here in Ohio, bars school faculty from disparaging one another and students due to political ideology.
“I think we should trust our teachers who show up for students, selflessly, to serve them every day,” said state Rep. Sean Brennan, D-Parma, a former public school teacher.
The bill passed the House largely along party lines.
The House’s priority was preserved in the Senate, though the higher chamber did add the provision that requires schools to reasonably accommodate a student’s sincerely held religious belief, a Senate priority originally backed by Sen. Michelle Reynolds, R-Canal Winchester, that passed unanimously in Senate Bill 49.
Sen. Catherine Ingram, D-Cincinnati, told her colleagues in June that the Senate’s addition of a popular amendment didn’t move the needle for her or her Democratic colleagues. She still viewed it as the government policing political speech in public spaces.
“Despite the fact that it continues to talk about freedom of speech and the ability for persons to express their thoughts,” Ingram said, “when we do that and we continue to talk about that (in law), we actually are limiting what can be expressed, because we’re telling them already: Here’s what you can’t talk about, here’s what you should not be doing.”
Despite unanimous Democratic opposition in both chambers of the Ohio General Assembly, H.B. 214 did not draw much push back from the public throughout the legislature’s deliberations aside from testimony from the Ohio Education Association, which argued that H.B. 214′s requirement that each school district adopt specific policies is unnecessary and would burdensome to school districts across the state.
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