Board Terminates PLHS Campus Supervisor for Religious Speech

Chris Lind, a campus supervisor at Prior Lake High School, was reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune as someone that students could come to for help through troubled times. Beyond simply bridging students and teachers as a keeper of order on the campus, Lind saw himself as a mentor. The problem for the local school board was that he was also a Christian whose advice to students was informed by his faith. Citing privacy laws, the school board refused to reveal in any detail the substance of the complaints that led to his dismissal at yesterday’s meeting.

Lind, who has been at Prior Lake High School for five years, was placed on administrative leave in May through the end of the school year. He was equally reticent to say much prior to the meeting though he did say that the district had told him not to talk to students — even off campus — about “traditional values,” namely, the district didn’t want him to talk to students about abstinence or their sexual orientation. In his counseling he did both: he advocated abstinence from sexual relationships before marriage and he identified homosexuality as sinful, though not more sinful than other sins.

By early last week, almost 500 people, including many who said they were parents or students, had signed an online petition supporting him, and dozens had shown up at a recent school board meeting to support him. To supporters, Lind’s treatment by the school board is religious discrimination, a trampling of First Amendment rights. “Chris is known throughout the community as a guy that students can talk to,” said Jim Barringer, pastor of student ministries at Friendship Church in Prior Lake, the congregation Lind attends. “We’re dealing with his private time here; we’re dealing with his rights to freedom of speech.”

The Star-Tribune reports that Roslyn Wade of the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry said that as an “at-will” employee of the Prior Lake-Savage school district, Lind could be fired “for any reason other than discrimination.” According to Joe Flynn, the district’s lawyer, because Lind wasn’t a licensed school employee or a union member, the district doesn’t need to go through an extensive hearing process before dismissal. There have been no Scott County criminal or civil charges filed against Lind. Human resources director Tony Massaros wouldn’t answer a generic question about what off-campus staff behavior the district can regulate but Bob Lowe, associate deputy director of the Minnesota School Boards Association, said school boards may control off-campus behavior of their employees.

After approval of Lind’s termination on Monday, the board released limited information on complaints against Lind in a prepared statement. They stated that Lind had discussed sexual orientation with students. He was told by superivisors to refrain from such discussion, and received a warning and suspension for a second similar situation before another incident and his termination. Lind said that the board’s statements about him are inaccurate, and he plans to take legal action.

The Prior Lake-Savage Area School Board is the school district’s governing body. It is composed of seven members, each of whom is a district resident elected by voters. The terms have been staggered, with elections conducted in November of odd-numbered years.

As Lind has admitted to the type of counsel he offered to students it would appear that he may disagree with the board concerning the performance coaching that the board has claimed was offered to him. The more important issue however, as both Lind and other local conservative evangelicals realize, is legal action in defense of his first ammendment rights.

Citizens of Prior Lake will have their opportunity to hold officials accountable for their decision through school board elections this November. Decisions by the Prior Lake school board and all public school boards must be responsive to the values of their electorate and this decision has seriously underapreciated both the numerical strength and the traditional values of their Christian constituency.

“swnewspapers” reports that the board is comprised of the following:

Lee Shimek, Chairwoman, 952-447-5314
Michael Murray, Vice Chairman, 952-440-5137
Dick Booth, Clerk/Treasurer, 952-440-4592
Sue Bruns, 952-440-8331
Tom Anderson 952-894-2976
Eric Pratt, 952-440-2945
Diane Ziemann, 952-233-4160

Click this link for additional contact information and for frequently called numbers

Click on this link for access to a Prior Lake discussion of the issue

Click on this link for the WCCO story and a news clip

Where Did the Time Go?

A question that we sometimes puzzle over at reunions and homecomings hits us with greater impact in middle age and thereafter–”Where did the time go?” 

A New York City pastor once preached a sermon in which he asked his congregation to imagine that the human life-span for each member was ninety years. Then he said, “Suppose we compress those ninety years into the waking hours of one day, say from seven in the morning until eleven at night …

If you are fifteen-years-old, then it is twenty-five past ten in the morning.

If you are twenty-five, it is twelve forty.

If you are thirty, it is ten minutes to two.

If you are forty, it is a little after four.

If you are forty-five, it is a quarter past five.

If you are fifty, it is six twenty-five.

If you are fifty-five, it is twenty-five minutes to eight.

If you are sixty, it is twenty minutes to nine.

If you are sixty-five, it is nine fifteen.

If you are seventy-five, it is ten minutes to ten.

If you are eighty-five, it is ten minutes past ten.”

 

Time is a precious resource–it passes more quickly than we imagine. 

Ruth Bell-Graham, 1920 – 2007

Ruth Graham and her husband Billy, often referred to themselves as ”happily incompatible,” and demonstrated through 64 years of marriage together that individual differences are no more than what a couple makes of them.  Ruth Graham, in addition to being remembered as a woman of faith, will be remembered as a woman of humor and some may recall hearing of Ruth’s reply to a reporter who one time asked her if she had ever thought of divorce, “I’ve never thought of divorce,” she said, “but I have thought of murder.”

MSNBC listed this snippet from Ruth’s diary in 1957: Mornings were chaos. “Four full-blooded little Grahams,” the young mother wrote in her journal. “ I feel this a.m. it’s gotten quite beyond me. They fight, they yell, they answer back. Breakfast is dreadful … Now they’ve gone off to school looking nice enough (for once) and with a good breakfast but with the scrappiest of family prayers … Grumbling, interrupting, slurring one another, impudent to me. So now they’re off, I’m in bed with my Bible thinking it through—or rather, trying to.”  One cannot read these lines without appreciation for their honesty, and by extension, for the encouragement that they provide to those of us who have also risen to the challenge of Christian parenthood.  I think it is this kind of transparency with which Billy and Ruth sought to live out their Christian lives that won the hearts of so many. 

Billy Graham’s comments following Ruth’s passing this week are a special tribute to the unique life that they have enjoyed together, “I am so grateful to the Lord that He gave me Ruth,” he said in a statement issued after her death. “Especially for these last few years … We’ve rekindled the romance of our youth, and my love for her continued to grow deeper every day. I will miss her terribly, and look forward even more to the day I can join her in Heaven.”

In the multiple tributes, scattered across the internet, the world has said to Ruth Graham, “well done.”  In every article her husband, her children, and those who knew her, called her, “blessed.”  Most important of all however, now standing in the company of the saints of ages past and in the presence of her Lord and His angels, she has heard the words that for Ruth, must have been the sweetest accolade of all, “Well done, good and faithful servant… enter into the joy of your Master.” 

Thank you Ruth Bell-Graham.