Schools Warned Away From Myth-Promoting ArkPark

Because deliberately shoving anti-science lies down the throats of innocent children should be a crime.

Linda Blackford and Bill Estep at the Herald:

A secular foundation has contacted hundreds of public schools in Kentucky to warn them against taking field trips to the Ark Encounter, the new amusement park featuring a 500-foot replica of Noah’s Ark and a belief that the world is only 6,000 years old.

That's a representation of a myth, not a "replica" of anything real.  And if it were, the fraud built by modern construction equipment is still orders of magnitude too small to carry what they myth-mongers claim it did.

Officials with the Freedom From Religion Foundation say field trips would expose children to religious proselytizing that would violate the constitutional separation between church and state.

In reply, Kentucky Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt sent a message to school districts late Monday saying that neither outside groups nor the Kentucky Department of Education should dictate field trip selection. But, he wrote, “it is important to remind educators that at all times and under all circumstances, field trips should be a direct extension of classroom learning. As a result, all off-site trips should be directly related to the school curriculum and should seek to maximize student learning by enhancing the classroom experience.”

All public school field trips should be approved by the school’s Site-Based Decision Making Council, made up of the principal, teachers and parents, and local school boards. Brad Hughes, spokesman for the Kentucky School Boards Association, said districts are encouraged to make sure that field trip approval policies are in place at the school and district levels.

Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said the group sent letters to more than 1,000 school districts in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia warning against organizing trips to the Ark.

The foundation has heard from parents concerned their districts will organize trips, such as year-end field trips.

“That would be completely inappropriate,” Gaylor said. “This is an attempt to proselytize children. The public school is to educate, not indoctrinate.”

Donald Ruberg, an attorney for the Grant County schools and an expert in education law, said he thinks the foundation’s position that school field trips would be impermissible in all cases is wrong.

“I think they are grossly overstating their case,” he said. “That’s not a correct interpretation of the law, in my opinion.”

You want to challenge the Establishment Clause, motherfucker, you better be stacking up piles of money taller than that fake boat to defend all the lawsuits from parents who don't want their children abused by freakazoid grifters.