State Rep. Jamie Kiel (R-Russellville) is not happy that the Legislature was unable to pass a bill on religious liberty in Alabama public schools recently.
The measure, originally introduced by State Rep. Susan DuBose (R-Hoover) in the House and State Sen. Shay Shelnut (R-Trussville) in the Senate, failed to make it through the State House Government Committee last week.
As someone who voted in favor of the legislation in the committee, Kiel said he was frustrated it didn’t get approved.
The lawmaker discussed the issue recently on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“This, first of all, is an elective,” Kiel said. “It’s not something that anybody’s requiring anybody to do if they’d rather stay at school and take core courses or elective courses at school. They can do that. And so I didn’t understand that argument. Exactly what is the issue with transporting kids off to campus? Secondly, there’s no taxpayer dollars being used to fund the program, and so it’s no cost to the schools, and because of that, it is entirely constitutional to do it. And thirdly, parents need to have a say on what their children are being taught.”
The bill had strong backing from Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, who blamed its failure on lawmakers caving to lobbyists like the School Superintendents of Alabama and the Alabama Association of School Boards.
“The legislators who allowed paid lobbyists to influence their committee votes on such a simple, commonsense issue should be ashamed,” Ainsworth said.
Kiel believes Ainsworth is exactly right.
“I agree with the lieutenant governor,” Kiel argued. “Kids leave campus all the time for a variety of things in Franklin County, where I’m at. And kids leave school campuses to go to vocational school…They obviously miss some class time to do that, but they take their electives at the centralized vocational school and, you know, get whatever elective they want that way.”
He also said that many schools don’t want the state to force them to do something like this.
“I honestly think they just don’t want to be told what to do,” he said. “They have the opportunity to do it now, we already have in state law that they may establish policies to, you know, to incorporate these curricula into their school day, and many just choose not to do it.”
Kiel believes this was a missed opportunity to give parents and students more options.
“We have great schools, but they just can’t teach the religious class at school that a private school can teach,” he explained. “And so to me, this gives the opportunity for the public school, in more ways than before, to compete with private schools. If that’s what we actually want, if we want a capitalistic, competitive environment among our education systems, then why not give the public schools the opportunity to offer these religious classes off campus? Give parents the choice that some of them make, some parents are making the choice to go to private school because they offer these Bible classes.”
“Why not give them the choice to do that at the public school?”
