Multiple pages of new school rules and modifications were up for a vote at Tuesday’s Osceola County School Board meeting, but only one was considered important enough to bring over two dozen members of the community to the podium to speak for the better part of two hours.
In the end, a plan to allow chaplains to serve students on campuses, supported by a 2-to-1 margin by the speakers, was omitted from the list of new school rules and policies passed unanimously by the board.
School district officials first drafted the policy in August after the Legislature passed House Bill 931, which allows for the presence of volunteer school chaplains on campuses, during its 2024 session. Gov. Ron DeSantis came to Tohopekaliga High School in Kissimmee on April 18 to sign the bill, which went into effect July 1.
The bill’s language requires prospective chaplains to meet certain background screening requirements and requires schools to describe what services or programs those chaplains will provide to parents. It requires written parental consent before a student participates in or receives those services. Parents must be permitted to select a volunteer school chaplain from the list provided by the school district, which must include the chaplain's religious affiliation, if any.
The topic has been brought up, and voted on, a number of times since August. When brought for a motion twice in August by former Board member Jon Arguello, it failed by a 3-2 vote each time.
Arguello, at his final meeting Oct. 22 before his District 3 seat passed to newly-elected Anthony Cook, convinced the Board to at least add it to the November rulemaking cycle for staff to again draft and bring for a vote.
Arguello was back Tuesday, as an audience member, to again speak in favor of the plan.
“It’s clear the community wants this, so it’s clear you resist what the community wants,” he directed toward the dais he sat on for the last four years. “This program is necessary. God is not a lie.
“You will harm our students by denying this. Here is something good for our population, and you deny it.”
Others who spoke in favor said chaplains would provide emotional support that emotional teens need in such a trying world and that the program would strictly be voluntary and require parental opt-in and consent. One speaker maintained that if fire departments, police departments and hospitals have chaplains on duty, schools should follow their lead.
Those against the plan shared concerns of how a religious leader will be apt to proselytize or preach in a biased manner and how that would be enforced or monitored; the policy’s vague definition of a chaplain’s role, and how it could bring litigation to the School District from those who question its constitutionality.
That was part of the concern Board Member Terry Castillo, who made the motion to accept the new policies in this round of additions and modifications, without adopting the chaplain plan.
“This opens our district up to potential financial risk, and I don’t want to take on risk,” she said. “Students still have the ability to express their faith; that’s still protected. I worry there will be a challenge to the (state) law as it is written.”
Castillo also expressed concern about the standards chaplains would be held to as volunteers.
“They would not be held to the same high standards we hold out OASIS volunteers to,” she said. “This would allow 1-on-1 meetings in a private room, something we don’t allow other volunteers to do. It’s things like that I couldn’t get passed to give (the policy) a ‘yes’ vote.”
Steven Jenkins with the Central Florida Freethought Community, a group vocally against the policy, spoke against it Tuesday, and said he expects it will surface again.
“The government tried to force their chaplains on us, but it was easy to debunk,” he said. “Christians are for it when their voice is the only one heard, but once the Satanic Temple would be allowed to have their chaplains in their children’s schools, they’d have a different opinion on this.
