TUSD superintendent alerts parents to reasons ‘After School Satan Club’ can meet at school | News

She said the district also permits distribution to students of noncommercial flyers that publicize services, special events, clubs, activities and public meetings.

“By law,” Larson-Everson noted, “the District cannot discriminate against groups wishing to use TUSD facilities or distribute flyers to students based on viewpoint.”

Consistent with the law and school board policy, the district approved the After School Satan Club’s request to host gatherings after school hours and distribute an associated flyer, the superintendent said.

A copy of a flyer was posted by local residents on several Facebook pages and groups on Tuesday morning, suggesting it has already been distributed to students. Local individuals or groups affiliated with the club, if any, were not identified on the flyer or in the school superintendent’s letter.

“It is important to note that the District does not endorse any of the groups or content affiliated with groups that host after school events on District property,” the superintendent noted in her letter to parents. “It is also important to note that the ASSC is not a District approved student club.”

She said the district is committed to minimizing any distractions the news may create to ensure a focus on providing a safe and secure learning environment.

According to the flyer, the club is sponsored by The Satanic Temple and Reason Alliance. The first meeting is planned for Dec. 5 with monthly meeting dates noted through May 1, 2023. The flyer also includes a parent permission form and a statement that the club is not an activity of the school or the school district.

The flyer advertising meetings at Tehachapi’s Golden Hills Elementary School provides a website link (TST.LINK/ASSC) where more information about the sponsoring organization can be found.

According to the website, the club “is an after school program that promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students.”

Articles published in The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times in 2016 noted that the Satanic Temple had plans to introduce the After School Satan Club to public schools across the country where Christian programs are operating.

A school district in Pennsylvania turned down an application for the club to meet at an elementary school earlier this year. But in August the same district allowed the club to rent a high school gymnasium for a fundraiser, citing reasons very similar to what the Tehachapi school superintendent noted — that the district can’t arbitrarily pick and choose what organizations use its facilities.

A Fox News report from Illinois in August said that that organization has a nationwide campaign to push back against the Christian Good News Clubs offered to schoolchildren after regular-hour classes.

Religious clubs weren’t allowed to use school facilities prior to a 2001 Supreme Court decision. According to an article in Education Week, the court ruled that when a school allows any group, secular or religious, to use school property after school it must allow all groups to have the same access.

According to Satanic Temple’s website, “The After School Satan Clubs meet at select public schools where Good News Clubs and other religious clubs meet. Clubs are set up at the request of local parents, educators, or other community members that would like to see the program offered. Trained educators provide activities and learning opportunities, which students are free to engage in, or they may opt to explore other interests that may be aided by available resources. The environment is open and parents/guardians are welcome to participate. While the classes are designed to promote intellectual and emotional development in accordance with TST’s tenets, no proselytization or religious instruction takes place.”

The organization offers a free download of its club handbook on its website.

The handbook states that the organization’s goal is to “provide a fun, intellectually stimulating, and non-proselytizing alternative to current religious after school clubs being offered in our public schools, which aim to indoctrinate children into their religious view.”

According to multiple news reports, the Internal Revenue Service recognized the Satanic Temple as a church in 2019, giving it nonprofit status.

The Satanic Temple states that its religion is non-theistic and non-supernaturalist, and is a separate and distinct religion from “Wicca, neo-paganism and neo-heathenism, and other occult or left-hand path traditions.” It also distances itself from an earlier organization, the Church of Satan, founded by Anton Szandor LaVey in the 1960s.

The Reason Alliance, the other sponsor of the After School Satan Club, is a nonprofit organization. According to its website it “promotes religious pluralism, fights for reproductive rights, protects children from abuse at school, and defends the unfairly and unjustly marginalized.”

Claudia Elliott is a freelance journalist and former editor of the Tehachapi News. She lives in Tehachapi and can be reached by email: [email protected].