By Sarah Holliday
The Washington Stand
Hundreds gathered at the Westerville City School Board of Education’s meeting in Ohio Tuesday night as the board voted whether to allow an optional Bible program for students to continue. In a controversial ruling, all but one board member voted to cut the program.
The program, LifeWise Academy, is a Christian ministry founded by Joel Penton in 2018 to legally enable children to regularly engage in biblical teaching during school hours. Such a program was birthed out of the 1952 Zorach v. Clauson Supreme Court ruling, which allows “public school children to leave campus during school hours to attend religious instruction and services.” However, because the school board voted to rescind policy 5223 that allowed absences for religious instruction, LifeWise was therefore rescinded as well.
Allegedly, Westerville City School considered changing this policy around the end of September. In a matter of weeks, the board chose to officially pull the plug on a policy that had been in place since 2009 — a change made effective immediately.
President of the Board Kristy Meyer said the decision had “nothing to do with any specific religion or religious programs in general.” This claim was supported by Jaclyn Fraley, a mom involved with the Westerville Parents United group that opposed the policy. She stated, “[A]t the core of this isn’t … against religion” or “Christianity, it’s just removing a policy that sows division and lack of inclusion amongst our children.”
According to 10 WBNS, those who came to witness the meeting were divided by red and black shirts — red signifying support for LifeWise and black signifying opposition to both the program and the policy. As Fraley said, the people who wanted to rescind the policy believed it caused distraction and “fostered a culture of bullying.” As such, on behalf of the black shirt attendees, Fraley said, “We’re ecstatic, we’re elated. We worked very hard.”
Conversely, Program Director for Westerville’s LifeWise Jennifer Jury noted how she was surprised by the official vote. “We’ve worked so well with the school district for the last two years,” she emphasized. “[We] had 300 students last year that attended LifeWise, so we were a little surprised that they felt they needed to take such an extreme action to rescind the policy rather than us being able to come to the table and figure out how we could continue to work together.”
As The Washington Stand reported in June, LifeWise had an objectively positive influence on the children that participated in the program. Despite leftist criticisms that claimed such a program would distract children and worsen the pre-existing literacy struggles, the 2023 LifeWise Outcome Report found that, when partnered with LifeWise, schools saw “improved attendance, lower discipline rates, and higher academic performance” across the board. This includes data pulled from the over 30,000 students in LifeWise chapters at over 500 locations across 23 states (as of the time of the report last year).
Joel Penton, founder and CEO of LifeWise, had shared on a previous edition of “Washington Watch” last month that LifeWise had grown even further in 2024, reaching just shy of 600 schools in about 30 states. In Westerville specifically, WBNS added that “LifeWise Academy has been teaching students, with parental permission, in the Westerville City Schools District for the last couple of years” in full compliance with the law by taking “students during their lunch and recess to an offsite location to teach them about the Bible.”
In a statement released by LifeWise, Penton explained how these aspects have not changed. “Westerville School Board’s decision to deny hundreds of students access to Bible-based character lessons during the school day is disappointing,” he wrote. Since Westerville made the decision to rescind the policy, “We have heard from families, teachers and community members who have seen the overwhelmingly positive impact that LifeWise has had on students who participate in the program. Further, educators have found LifeWise to be a complementary part of the school day, not an impediment, as students often return to class better behaved and more engaged in the classroom.”
“As I’ve said before,” Penton urged, “this situation clearly underscores why the legislature must work expediently to pass HB 445, which requires school districts to adopt policies for religious released time instruction, providing more clarity to communities that want to implement such a program.” He highlighted how “many states already have such legislation in place,” and “Ohio families deserve the same opportunity to choose Bible-based character study during the school day as families do in other states, such as neighboring Indiana.”
In comments to TWS, Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon remarked, “For people who, like me, grew up going to church and don’t feel life is complete without church and God, it’s shocking to think that some would find a program like this ‘divisive.’ This is evidence of the degradation of how community and shared values in our society are no longer culturally organized with a church or Christ at its center.” When seeing “the challenges faced by LifeWise in this situation,” it further demonstrates “how important it is for the church to engage in our world — even as we are seemingly being pushed out,” she added.
Kilgannon, who serves as FRC’s senior fellow for Education Studies, emphasized that “Christians have always built culture. Additionally, “[W]e are put here by God in this place at this time to continue that work” in schools, politics, and society at large. “[I]t is our sacred obligation to do so,” she concluded, and “Matthew 18:6 reminds us why.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand!
