Good For Them

The NYC city council has just passed a resolution allowing religious groups to worship in public schools, taking a stand on a decades-old controversy. Since 1994, state legislators and activists with a radical interpretation of the First Amendment have been trying to evict New York City churches from public schools. The official New York City Board of Education policy forbids religious institutions from renting public schools, a restriction that applies to no other type of organization. Churches and their supporters have been fighting back, and the battle over the enforcement of this policy has taken a serpentine path though both state legislative bodies and state and national courts.