CHICAGO -- When high school freshman Dawn Sherman learned that Illinois had a law requiring public schools to provide a moment of silence each day for "reflection and student prayer," she was outraged.
Not because the law meant lost learning time in her honors math class - which would be 15 seconds shorter - but because "it was clear that we're supposed to sit and pray, or sit and watch other people pray," said Dawn, who is an atheist.
Along with her father, Rob, the Buffalo Grove High School student has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law, which some Illinois school boards have raced to embrace and others have defied.
"I don't go to school to talk to God," she said. "I'm in school to learn."
The debate reflects a long-standing national fight over school prayer. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1962 ruled that official sponsorship or endorsement of prayer in schools violates the First Amendment. Over time, state lawmakers found that they were allowed to require moments of silence as long as students were not forced or encouraged to pray.
But there were limits: In the mid-1980s, an Alabama mandatory "moment of silence" law was found unconstitutional by the high court because "there was a clear legislative record that they were trying to advocate getting prayer back into schools," said Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington.
"Since then, legislators have been far more careful about what they're saying about why such measures are pushed forward," Haynes said.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 12 other states - Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia - also require such moments of quiet in the classroom. In more than 20 other states, teachers are allowed to decide whether they want such a classroom timeout.
U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman in Illinois will hear oral arguments over whether to grant class-action status to the Shermans' case.
In the meantime, Gettleman has ordered Township High School District 214, which oversees Buffalo Grove High, not to have a moment of silence. He also has barred the superintendent of the state school board from enforcing the rule or issuing any directive on how the issue should be handled in other schools.
Critics of such laws argue that they are a first step to threatening the Constitution's separation of church and state.
