Leaders of the Sioux Falls School Board plan to propose expanding the district's policy on reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
The move comes following a telephone survey of parents of children who attend class at Sioux Falls public schools. Board president Doug Morrison says 3,500 people responded to the survey, with 70 percent saying they want the Pledge of Allegiance recited in schools of all grade levels.
Members of the school board most recently changed the policy to include reciting the Pledge in the city's middle schools, because it was already common practice. Previously a district-wide policy incorporated the daily Pledge of Allegiance into only elementary schools.
Vice president Kent Alberty says the board put the issue of saying the Pledge out for public comment, and he says members received one public comment on the issue. Morrison says the board took that response and their research within the schools into consideration in expansion to the middle schools but not the high schools.
"[We] said, well, surely, if everyone's s passionate about this, they would be commenting on us and calling us and writing us, and our veterans would be down here petitioning us to have it expand to the high school, and, as Board Member Alberty said, we never heard anything," Morrison says. "I guess, as a board, we feel that we don't impose our personal beliefs on our policies. We say, 'What does our community want?' And our community spoke to us loudly by their silence here," Morrison says. "So we adopted the policy, and, when we walked away from the table, felt pretty good that we were representing what our community wanted at that point."
After a report about the decision to include middle schools in the policy but leave out public high schools, school board members received complaints from across the country, and some of those were death threats. Alberty says many of those people didn't understand the decision the school board made.
"I believe that a lot of the uproar was because of an inaccurate headline, and our policy that we're going to move forward with says that the Pledge of Allegiance or other patriotic activity will be performed in all district classrooms on a daily basis," Alberty says. "It's very simple. I hope that it will address the concern of Mr. Borman who addressed us at the last school board meeting and his supporters."
Alberty says school board members serve their community, and he says, based on the parent survey, implementing a broader Pledge of Allegiance policy aligns the board with the majority of parents.
Morrison and Alberty note that the policy the school boards plans to adopt includes a detail that no student is forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The text of that policy document becomes available Sunday at 5:30 p.m. The Sioux Falls School Board meets Monday night.