Free school breakfast bill passes Arkansas Senate, heads to Gov. Sanders' desk
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — An Arkansas Senate bill designed to offer free school breakfast passes in the House on Feb. 13 and now heads to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' desk for her to sign.
Siloam Springs School District, lawmaker react to free breakfast bill in legislation
Senate Bill 59 passed the Arkansas House with an 88-4 vote. Two representatives did not vote. Six voted present.
The bill aims to remove any eligibility restrictions on free breakfast programs for any public school student in Arkansas, regardless of the student's eligibility for federal free or reduced-price meals. The bill does not apply to private schools.
Free school breakfast bill advances in Arkansas legislature
The cost would be covered first by federal funding, and then supplemented by state funding. State funding would come from sales tax and special privilege tax on medical marijuana sales in the state.
Once Sanders signs the bill, it will take effect in fall 2025
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Newsweek
4 hours ago
- Newsweek
Arkansas Sued Over Ten Commandments in Schools
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Seven Arkansas families filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging a new state law that will require public school classrooms to post copies of the Ten Commandments, saying it will violate their constitutional rights. "Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and library—rendering them unavoidable—unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state's favored religious scripture," the lawsuit said. The lawsuit challenges a measure that Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law earlier this year. The law, which requires the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in public school classrooms and libraries, takes effect in August. This is a breaking news story. Updates to follow.
Boston Globe
6 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘Where was God?' The Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting 10 years later.
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up This was quite remarkable, because less than 48 hours earlier, on the night of June 17, 2015, Sanders had just closed her eyes in benediction — during Bible study at her beloved Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — when she was jolted by an explosion of gunfire. The 57-year-old woman, a fourth-generation member of 'Mother Emanuel,' the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, dove under a table and pulled her 11-year-old granddaughter down with her. She squeezed the child so tightly she feared she might crush her, instructing her to play dead as a 21-year-old white supremacist methodically assassinated nine of the 12 Black worshippers in the basement fellowship hall. Those she watched die included her 26-year-old son, Tywanza Sanders, who had tried vainly to distract the shooter, and her 87-year-old aunt, Susie Jackson, who was shredded by 10 hollow-point bullets. At one point, Sanders smeared her legs with the blood pooling at her feet so that the killer might think he had finished her off. It worked. What happened in court two days later, a procession of forgiveness by Black victims for a remorseless racist murderer, both awed and befuddled the world. Many found it to be the purest expression of Christianity they had ever witnessed and could not imagine ever being graced in any such way. With the help of a soaring and melodic eulogy for the victims by President Barack Obama, the church known as Mother Emanuel soon became an earthly emblem of amazing grace. FILE - Tyrone Sanders and Felicia Sanders comfort each other at the graveside of their son, Tywanza Sanders, on June 27, 2015, at Emanuel AME Cemetery in Charleston, S.C. (Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier via AP, File) Grace Beahm/Associated Press Now fast-forward to December 2016. Felicia Sanders is back in court, the lead witness in the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof. She is under cross-examination by Roof's attorney, who is trying to establish that Roof threatened to kill himself that night, a desperate stab at a psychiatric defense. This time there is no nod by Sanders at forgiveness, no prayer for the soul of her son's unrepentant executioner. 'He say he was going to kill himself, and I was counting on that,' Sanders responds coolly in her Lowcountry lilt, glaring at Roof from the stand. 'He's evil. There's no place on earth for him except for the pit of hell.' Roof's lawyer, blindsided, tries once more to prompt Sanders about Roof's suicidality. She is having none of it: 'Send himself back to the pit of hell, I say.' Had something changed about Felicia Sanders? Had she, in the 18 months between the Emanuel murders and the trial, forsaken the commitment to forgiveness that was such a hallmark of her faith and that had so moved the world? 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But it also was an iteration of a timeworn survival mechanism that has helped African American Christians withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship, and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls and their sanity still, somehow, intact. One year after the shootings at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., relatives and friends of the slain gathered to honor their lives. Grace Beahm/Associated Press Churches like Emanuel, which has roots in antebellum Charleston, have long served as physical and spiritual refuges from the scourges that confront Black Americans. Its own long history, a two-century cycle of suppression and resistance, illuminates the relentless afflictions of caste in the city where nearly half of all enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Emanuel's predecessor congregation, which formed in 1817 after a subversive walkout from Methodist churches by free and enslaved Black Charlestonians, faced immediate harassment from white authorities. The police raided services and jailed worshippers by the scores. When an incipient slave insurrection plot was uncovered in 1822 and traced back in part to the church, 35 men were led to the gallows, nearly half of them from the congregation. The wood-frame building was dismantled by order of the authorities and the church's leading ministers forced into exile. Emanuel's founding pastor after the Civil War, Richard Harvey Cain, used its pulpit as a springboard into politics, winning seats in the state legislature and Congress in a career that mirrored at first the heady hope and then the stolen promise of Reconstruction. During the depths of Jim Crow, Charlestonians assembled at Emanuel to voice outrage over lynchings and jurisprudential travesties. Its civil rights era pastor, Benjamin J. Glover, also led Charleston's NAACP, staged peaceful protest marches from the church, and was repeatedly jailed. Congregants were urged to action there by Booker T. Washington (1909), W.E.B. DuBois (1921), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1962), and then, a year after King's assassination, by his widow, Coretta Scott King (1969). She came to support a hospital workers' strike that bore eerie echoes of the sanitation workers' strike that had drawn her husband to Memphis. Nearly five decades later, the first person shot by Dylann Roof on June 17, 2015, was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a remarkable prodigy who had been the youngest African American elected to South Carolina's legislature and was serving his fourth term in the state Senate. A horse-drawn carriage carried the casket of the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney past the Confederate flag and onto the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, S.C. on June 24, 2015. REUTERS The weight of it all takes the breath away. And for many, forgiveness might seem an inadequate response, given available options like anger, bitterness, hatred, revenge, retribution. A more natural one, perhaps a more human one, might even be 'Where was God?' But in interviews over the years, each of the six family members who spoke mercifully toward Dylann Roof explained that they did so for their own spiritual release. They depicted the moment in mystical terms — unpremeditated, unexpected, the words just flowed, it was God talking. But none said they meant for their words to be read as a grant of exoneration or a pass from accountability. No slate had been wiped. Indeed, some did not care much whether Roof lived or died (he remains on federal death row in Indiana, one of three inmates whose sentences were not commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the close of his term). Rather, the mothers and children and widowers of the dead described their brand of forgiveness as a purging of self-destructive toxins, a means for reversing the metastasis of rage, and at its most basic a way to get out of bed each morning in the face of it all. It served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a method not only of moral practice but of emotional self-preservation. Because the choice to forgive was one dignity that could not be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment. It might be mistaken for submission, but in Charleston it resurrected agency for victims who had been robbed of it. 'He is not a part of my life anymore,' the Rev. Anthony Thompson, the widower of Bible study leader Myra Thompson, told me in explaining his forgiveness of Roof. 'Forgiveness has freed me of that, of him, completely. I'm not going to make him a lifetime partner.' This may be disconcerting for some white Americans who found reassurance in the notion that those who forgave Dylann Roof were, by association, also forgiving — or at least moving beyond — the four-century legacy of white supremacy that contributed to his poisoning. They decidedly were not, and the question of whether we make serious progress toward eradicating the psychosis of race in this country and the inequities it bequeaths in wealth, education, housing, justice, and health, not to mention hope, awaits an answer on the 50th or 100th anniversary of the massacre at Mother Emanuel.
USA Today
8 hours ago
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Arkansas families suing to block Ten Commandments in public classrooms, libraries
Arkansas families suing to block Ten Commandments in public classrooms, libraries Show Caption Hide Caption Texas lawmaker challenges Ten Commandments bill on the 'Sabbath' A Texas state bill that would require public schools to post donated placards of the Ten Commandments created an "ironic" moment in debate. Seven Arkansas families have filed a federal lawsuit to block a new law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms in the state, arguing that the law will infringe on their constitutional rights. In the complaint, filed June 11 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, the families challenged an upcoming state law that requires the Ten Commandments to be "prominently" displayed in every public classroom and library. The law, which takes effect in August, was signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in April. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a multifaith group of families by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU), and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The defendants include four school districts — Fayetteville, Springdale, Bentonville, and Siloam Springs — in northwest Arkansas. Attorneys for the families, who are Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, or non-religious, said the law "violates longstanding U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment." The attorneys are asking a federal judge to declare the state requirement unconstitutional. In addition to the complaint, the attorneys are planning to file a motion for a preliminary and permanent injunction to block the implementation of the law while the suit is pending. "By imposing a Christian-centric translation of the Ten Commandments on our children for nearly every hour of every day of their public-school education, this law will infringe on our rights as parents and create an unwelcoming and religiously coercive school environment for our children," Samantha Stinson, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. The lawsuit was publicly released by the AU on June 11 and viewed by USA TODAY. The Arkansas Attorney General's Office did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment on June 11. Related: How the Supreme Court could still reshape religious liberty with decisions in two cases Lawsuit: Ten Commandments law interferes with religious freedom According to the complaint, the display of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms and libraries will interfere with parents' right to direct their children's religious education and upbringing. The lawsuit further argues that the state requirement will create a "religiously coercive" school environment for children. Under the state law, each classroom and library will be required to post the Ten Commandments 'in a conspicuous place," the lawsuit states. The display of the text must be at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall and be printed in a "typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the room," according to the complaint. The law also mandates that schools and libraries display a specific version of the Ten Commandments, which the suit states is associated with Protestant faiths and conflicts with the version followed by many Jews and Catholics. "Permanently posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom and library—rendering them unavoidable—unconstitutionally pressures students into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state's favored religious scripture," the complaint states. "It also sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments ... do not belong in their own school community and pressures them to refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state's religious preferences," the complaint added. It's not the first time. GOP leaders are calling for religion in public schools. Republican-led states push for religion in public classrooms Authorities in Republican-led states across the country have been pushing to spread religious teachings into public school classrooms, including incorporating the Bible into lessons and requiring schools to post state-selected versions of the Ten Commandments. School administrators and civil rights advocates have expressed opposition to the mandates, saying they violate students' constitutional rights. "Our Constitution's guarantee of church-state separation means that families – not politicians – get to decide if, when and how public-school children engage with religion," Rachel Laser, president and CEO of the AU, said in a statement on June 11. "This law is part of the nationwide Christian Nationalist scheme to win favor for one set of religious views over all others and nonreligion — in a country that promises religious freedom. Not on our watch. We're proud to defend the religious freedom of Arkansas schoolchildren and their families," Laser continued. The Arkansas law is similar to a Louisiana requirement that was signed in June 2024 by Gov. Jeff Landry. The Louisiana law was later blocked by a federal judge who declared it unconstitutional. The case, which is currently on appeal, is also being represented by the same counsel as the Arkansas lawsuit, attorneys said. In November 2024, Texas officials proposed a curriculum that includes teachings from the Bible. The state legislature also recently passed a bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign the measure, which would take effect in September. In July 2024, Oklahoma's top education official ordered public schools to teach the Bible, which large state school districts have largely ignored. Despite the state's Republican-controlled legislature's rejection of his $3 million request to fund the effort, state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters has insisted classrooms would all have Bibles by fall 2025. Contributing: Murray Evans, The Oklahoman, part of the USA TODAY Network
