Teens for Christ Buck School Law
By Terry Coville, Daily Pilot Staff, The Daily Pilot, California
January 23, 1969, North America
The young, determined Teens for Christ today appear on a collision course with the California Education Code, and neither educators nor teens appear willing to step off the track.
The Huntington Beach based hippie-style Christians’ latest problem involves two teenage girls in trouble with Marina High School authorities for distributing Bible tracts on school grounds.
Cheryl Pierce, 17, a senior at Marina has been suspended from school for a week for what she calls “Christian witnessing.”
Barbara Kaliber, 14, a Marina freshman, claims she had to sign a handwritten agreement stating she knew the California Education Code’s provisions for passing out literature on school grounds.
Tuesday afternoon, the Teens for Christ picketed the school to protest the actions, as has been their custom in past similar instances.
The California Education Code, sections 8453 and 8454, is always the reason given for suspension of Teens for Christ followers who have been handing out Bible excerpts and tracts.
The code forbids the distribution on campus of any publication of a “… sectarian, partisan, or denominational character…”
Teens for Christ charge that the teaching of evolution in itself violates the code, and further, that the code violates their freedom of religion as guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Concerning the two most recent actions, Miller defended the code saying, “We have a captive audience here because by state law these students have to attend school. The purpose of the Educational Code is to prevent special groups from taking advantage of this captivity.”
Meantime the young Christian crusaders kept testing the code as more teens pass Bible tracts to their classmates.
In summing up her rugged determination to buck the school system. Cheryl stated, “I’m going to live for Jesus until the day I die. If that’s breaking the law—praise God!”