BATON ROUGE, La. (news agencies) — Even as a legal challenge is already underway over a new Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms, the details of how the mandate will be implemented and enforced remain murky.
Across the country there have been conservative pushes to incorporate religion into classrooms, from Florida legislation allowing school districts to have volunteer chaplains to counsel students to Oklahoma’s top education official ordering public schools to incorporate the Bible into lessons.
In Louisiana, the logistics for the new law are still unclear.
Unless a court halts the legislation, schools have just over five months until they will be required to have a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in all public school K-12 and state-funded university classrooms. But it’s unclear whether the new law has any teeth to enforce the requirement and penalize those who refuse to comply.
Supporters of the law say donations will pay for the thousands of posters needed, while critics argue the law is an unfunded mandate that could burden schools. And teachers in some schools have said they likely won’t hang the posters, including in the blue city of New Orleans, where residents and officials have a history of resisting conservative policies.
Louisiana has more than 1,300 public schools. Louisiana State University has nearly 1,000 classrooms at the main Baton Rouge campus alone and seven other campuses statewide. That means thousands of posters will be needed to satisfy the new law.
The Louisiana Department of Education is required by the new law to identify and post on its website resources that can provide the posters free of charge.
Lawmakers backing the bill said during debate in May that the posters or funds to print them will likely be donated to schools in this deep Bible Belt state. Nationwide praise for the law from conservative groups and figures including, most recently, former President Donald Trump, could result in outside financial support for the mandate.
Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian conservative organization, has already created a page on its website for donations that “will be used specifically for the purpose of producing and distributing ‘10 Commandments’ displays to educational institutions around Louisiana.”
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