Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has signed legislation eliminating America’s last ban on public school teachers wearing religious garb, ending a 128-year-old prohibition.
A one-sentence news release from Mr. Shapiro’s office said the Democrat last week signed Senate Bill 84, known as Act 26, which the Legislature had passed at the end of October. The repeal allows teachers to wear crosses, Stars of David, hijabs and other religious objects in public school classrooms.
State Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, a Republican, sponsored the bill with Sen. Judy Schwank, a Democrat.
Ms. Phillips-Hill noted in a statement that the state’s most recent ban, found in a 1949 public school code, dated back to measures that had been “in place for over a century.”
“The legislation has been around for more than a decade to remove this provision from our Education Code,” Ms. Phillips-Hill said via email. “I’ve sponsored it since being sworn in to the Senate in 2019. I am hopeful that with this new law, we will see teachers be able to worry about teaching and meeting the needs of their students rather than complain because he or she wore a necklace with a cross on it or the Star of David.”
Early this century, Brenda Nichol, then a teacher’s aide at ARIN Intermediate Unit 28 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, was suspended for a year without pay for wearing a cross to work and refusing to hide or remove it. In 2003, she filed a federal lawsuit and a court ruled in her favor, according to Ms. Phillips-Hill’s statement.
“The original law was pursued by the Ku Klux Klan, which fought to put in place this prohibition on teachers who were practicing Catholics from displaying their religion in the classroom. Many other states put in place similar prohibitions on teachers using the Pennsylvania law as a model,” the statement said.
Oregon repealed a similar ban in 2010, and Nebraska scrapped it in 2017, leaving Pennsylvania as the last of an estimated 38 states that had enacted such restrictions. Most faded as the American Protective Association, an organization opposed to Catholic influence in politics and had promoted the restrictions, declined in influence. The group collapsed in 1911.
Nathan Diament, executive director for public policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, said the ban’s repeal is a positive step for religious freedom.
“It’s certainly the right move in terms of opening up all areas of profession to people of all different faiths to enable them to practice their faith in the workplace as they wish,” Mr. Diament told The Washington Times. “Removing the ban means public education in Pennsylvania will not be off limits to people of faith for whom religious attire is important.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose Pennsylvania chapter in 2010 noted the ban, calling it “an outdated law and does not reflect the multicultural, diverse society we enjoy today.”
“With the repeal of this 128-year-old prohibition, we celebrate a triumph for religious freedom and acknowledge the progress toward embracing our multicultural and diverse society,” Christine Mohamed of CAIR Pittsburgh said Monday via email.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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