ELCA Board Addresses School Vouchers, Other Social Issues

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- A social policy resolution on school vouchers for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has been recommended by the ELCA Division for Church in Society (DCS). The DCS board met here Feb. 24-26, proposed the ELCA Church Council adopt the voucher resolution, and addressed a number of issues it expects the church to confront in the near future.
The voucher resolution is meant to help the church's state public policy offices as they evaluate school voucher proposals on a case-by-case= =20 basis, said the Rev. James M. Childs Jr., board chair. Childs is dean of academic affairs and professor of theology and ethics, Trinity Lutheran Seminary, Columbus, Ohio.
"When voucher issues are brought in various locations, there are certain criteria that will guide us in how we do our advocacy -- for or against," said Childs. "We are not taking the position of favoring vouchers, and we are not suggesting that they would always be the wrong choice."
"Some voucher programs can be genuinely beneficial, given the context, but always we have a total commitment to a high quality education for all and to those measures that best enable persons who are least advantaged to access high quality education. We have no desire to undermine public schools at all," he said.
The resolution lists eight goals by which to evaluate proposals for education reform: + provide public schools the support and resources necessary to fulfill their tasks; + increase equal access to high quality education for all, especially for children and youth who live in poverty or are otherwise disadvantaged; + enhance families' -- especially families living in poverty and other situations of hardship -- ability to select the right high quality education for their children; + allow participating schools, including religious ones, to maintain their distinctive character and mission; + protect against all forms of invidious discrimination against students; + provide eligible families sufficient and accurate information on participating schools; + ensure ways for measuring the educational achievements of students in participating schools; and + establish means to evaluate the positive and negative results of the program and, in light of these results, to consider if the program should be continued, modified or ended.
The Rev. Timothy J. Swenson, Our Savior Lutheran Church, Halliday, N.D., voted against the resolution. He said vouchers may allow parents to put their children into religious schools not necessarily because they provide a higher quality education than that provided by public schools but because they provide education from a different perspective, and he did not see that addressed in the resolution's goals.
The Church Council will meet here April 7-10. It will consider making the social policy resolution on school vouchers an interim policy of the church, for possible ratification in August 2001 by the ELCA Churchwide Assembly in Indianapolis.
The board discussed several other matters.
The Rev. Charles S. Miller, executive director of the ELCA Division for Church in Society, reported to the board that 1999 had been a very successful year for the church's World Hunger Appeal.
A special emphasis during the ELCA World Hunger Program's 25th anniversary was expected to provide about $350,000 more than previously was budgeted to distribute, he said. While the board was meeting, Miller received word that the figure may be closer to $600,000.
"The allocation of the unanticipated increase in hunger money is going to follow roughly the pattern of allocations that was originally budgeted," said Childs. "The programs toward which we are putting this money are the programs on which we made the appeal to the church."
"What was budgeted originally never comes close to meeting all the needs. Even the increase of money available, in all likelihood, will still not meet all the needs; we are dealing with such a massive problem," he said.
Miller's report to the board set priorities for programs which would receive any additional money. At the top of the list were Jubilee 2000, the international movement to ease the debts of poorer nations; Simba Circle, a summer camping program for young African American men; urban agriculture; urban gardening programs, especially for people with disabilities; and the ELCA's Women and Children Living in Poverty program. Additional money will also bolster the division's ability to provide grants toward various hunger-related programs across the church, said Miller.
In other action, the DCS board: + voted unanimously to re-elect Miller to another four-year term as the division's executive director; + heard reports on and discussed the ELCA's involvement in the international Decade for a Culture of Nonviolence; + raised several topics for future consideration by the board, such as a possible social justice message to state concisely the church's support for the human rights of gay and lesbian people; + approved the ELCA Corporate Social Responsibility priorities of environment, equity in the workplace, land mines and community reinvestment for 2000-2001; + approved guidelines for ELCA participation in Lutheran World Federation delegations to meetings and conferences of the United Nations; and + recommended the ELCA Church Council transfer its participation in the Chicago area's Advocate Health Care Network to the ELCA Metropolitan Chicago Synod.
The DCS board's next meeting will be Sept. 28-30 in Rockford, Ill.

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