Equal Access Act

When public school students today want to form an after-school club, they are afforded the freedom to create almost any sort of club they want. The legal basis for this is the Equal Access Act. Passed in 1984, this act requires federally-funded schools to grant equal access to all extracurricular clubs. The act states that a school which provides an open forum for one club must do so for any other club, regardless of the political or religious views of its members. In the case of religion-based clubs and gay-straight alliances, opponents have claimed that the Equal Access Act is unconstitutional because it is not consistent with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Despite the Equal Access Act, a student named Bridget Mergens from Omaha, NE was denied the right to start a Christian club at her school. Her school claimed that they had not created an open forum, and that all other clubs hosted in the school were related to various curricula. The school also argued that preventing a religious club was consistent with the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Eventually, the case reached the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of Bridget Mergens. It was decided that the other clubs held at the school were in fact non-curricular and thus the Christian club was allowed in the school. While some people may think that allowing religiously based clubs in public schools interferes with the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom of religion, it is permissible when a student group creates the club and holds it outside of normal class periods. This is because the Equal Access Act serves an overall secular purpose by allowing the free and open discussion of religion and other potentially controversial topics. When the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bridget Mergens, it upheld the constitutionality of the Equal Access Act.

Recently, the Equal Access Act has been frequently used in debates over Gay-Straight Alliance clubs being formed in public schools. While many public schools have tried to put a stop to GSAs due to their potential divisiveness or to prevent disruption or protests by non-members, the Equal Access Act has been used to defend the rights of students forming clubs in schools. Even when other students created disruptions by protesting the GSA in Boyd County, KY, a federal judge ruled that since the GSA members themselves were not causing any disruption, the GSA must not be discriminated against by the school.

I am in favor of the Equal Access Act because it allows students to freely discuss anything that interests them. While I would be staunchly against a public school board or faculty member implementing a religious club, I wholly agree that all clubs should be allowed if they are founded by students and do not cause any type of objective harm to other students. Censoring student speech by discriminating against certain clubs is not constitutional.

It is interesting to read up on the Equal Access Act's particulars. At my public high school, our GSA was allowed to exist but not allowed to advertise its meetings. The principal's reasoning for this was that, in the past, other students had protested the GSA and caused problems for the school. As a member, I remember thinking this policy was unfair. Now I know that it violated the Equal Access Act, because the act requires that all clubs be given equal treatment. Since the other clubs at my high school were allowed to announce meetings on the PA system and pass out flyers, the GSA should have been able to as well. It is really surprising to find out that my school did the same thing that has begun many court cases. To me, this just goes to show that the Equal Access Act is very important and that more students should be informed about it.