Another year, another clueless school board

Springboro, Ohio, described by Wikipedia as “an affluent suburb of Cincinnati and Dayton,” has a school board on which two members are pushing for the inclusion of creationism in the district’s science curriculum. The Dayton Daily News reported today that BOE members Kelly Kohls and Scott Anderson, elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility, are one vote away from a creationist majority on the Board. According to the story, Kohls requested that

… the district’s curriculum director look into ways of providing “supplemental” instruction dealing with creationism.

It goes on

“Creationism is a significant part of the history of this country,” Kohls said. “It is an absolutely valid theory and to omit it means we are omitting part of the history of this country.”

Consistent with Lenny Flank’s law, though, Kohls makes the motivation for her advocacy of creationism clear:

Kohls is the head of the Warren County Tea Party. Although she said her desire to teach creationism is not directly related to the emerging political movement, it’s not inconsistent with Tea Party ideals.

“My input on creationism has everything with me being a parent and not a member of the Tea Party,” she said. “We are motivated people who want to change the course of this country. Eliminating God from our public lives I think is a mistake and is why we have gone in the direction of spending beyond our means.”

Nice.

There’s some support for the push from another source:

John Silvius, a former biology professor at Cedarville University, a Christian institution that teaches both evolution and creationism, said the two theories can co-exist, even in a public school classroom.

Cedarville is a Baptist young-earth institution; it even has a young earth geology program, taught, it is claimed, from “both naturalistic and young-earth paradigms of earth history.”

I trust that the curriculum director will read documents like Edwards v. Aguilar, McLean v. Arkansas, and Epperson v. Arkansas, not to mention Kiztmiller v. Dover. I also hope that the Board’s legal advisers have their wits about them.

The two creationism-pushing board members were supposedly elected on a fiscal responsibility platform. How fiscally responsible is it to expose the district to expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars by advocating a bankrupt religious approach in public schools? The Mt. Vernon, OH, and Dover, PA, boards could provide Springboro with some advice on just how “fiscally responsible” pushing creationism is. The same sort of shenanigans cost those districts on the order of $1m each.