Tuesday, February 16, 1999
Adams Co. ponders monuments
Board meets in private on complaint
BY RAY SCHAEFER
Enquirer Contributor
WEST UNION, Ohio — Adams County's board of education has to consider the poor district's financial situation in deciding how to respond to a challenge to Ten Commandments monuments outside its high schools, the district's attorney said Monday.
“Adams County is a poor district. They have to take into consideration how much, if they lost, they would have to pay the ACLU” in attorney fees, Bronston McCord, a Cincinnati attorney representing the board, said after a special meeting Monday.
The meeting, which went into a three-hour executive session, was called to consider a complaint filed in U.S. District Court against the board Feb. 9 seeking the monuments' removal. The challenge was filed by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of an Adams County resident.
“I'm quite certain from the reaction by the constituents of Adams County, they (the board members) don't want to pay attorney fees to the ACLU,” said Mr. McCord.
“You don't want to take money away from the kids, and that's what's going to happen if we have to go forward with this thing.”
After Monday's meeting, board members had little to say, except that no decision had been made on how to respond to the constitutional challenge by Berry Baker of Steam Furnace Road in Peebles, filed with assistance from the ACLU.
Mr. Baker wants a judge to order school officials to remove the stones from Manchester, North Adams, Peebles and West Union high schools and to declare their presence unconstitutional. An Adams County ministerial association paid for them.
“Obviously the board is concerned about the potential exposure to the district, the potential exposure of themselves and the effect this is going to have on Adams County in general, as far as the kids are concerned,” Mr. McCord said.
He said the board could decide how to proceed at its regular meeting next Monday or later.
Monday's special meeting of the Adams County/Ohio Valley school board was the first time Dana Hendrix had stood in public to express her views.
She was among a small group of residents drawn to the meeting by the threat of removal of four stone monuments, carved with the Ten Commandments, erected at the doors of four Adams County high schools.
But they made their viewpoints known with signs that had such words as “Stand Firm” and “We Support the Ten Commandments and the Adams County/Ohio Valley Local School Board.”
“I just feel like so many times we don't stand up for what we believe is right,” said Ms. Hendrix, 32, of Monroe Township. “I don't want to do that anymore.”
Mr. Baker entered the fray nearly a year ago, several months after the monuments were erected.
In a March 1 letter to Superintendent Albert Porter, Mr. Baker, who describes himself as the interim director of the Center for Phallic Worship in Peebles, said he wanted to place a nearly 61/2-foot phallus at each of the schools.
“There shall be a plaque mounted at the base explaining that they are phallic symbols and are reflective of a form of worship that has been engaged in since pre-historic times,” the letter said.
The case has drawn attention from the American Family Associa tion Center for Law and Policy in Tupelo, Miss., and Washington, D.C. Brian Fahling, a senior trial attorney, said the district is within its rights to decide what to allow and what to prohibit outside its schools.
Monday's meeting sparked impromptu discussions about the complaint's merits.
Emersen Schoenfeld, 17, a junior at Manchester High, knows students who object to the Ten Commandments. “I know a lot of atheists who get upset about the Ten Commandments,” he said. “They get violent.”
Another, Chris Setty, 18, a senior at Ohio Valley Vocational School in West Union, said media attention has been distracting.
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