Valor Collegiate Prep Builds Muslim Prayer Bell Into Daily Schedule

Valor Collegiate Prep, a tuition-free public charter school funded by taxpayer dollars and subject to the same constitutional constraints as any traditional public school, serves about 1,900 students in grades 5 through 12. The school has special procedures it implements to make provisions for Muslim students, including a daily bell that sounds in the afternoon to signal prayer time.

“At Valor, we have a bell throughout the entire school year, not only during Ramadan, to let students who need to pray report to the gym and pray,” upper school principal Brad Gill told us. “It is built into our daily bell schedule and occurs at the end of one class period, signaling when students may report for prayer.”

Like Overton High School, Valor’s student body is extremely diverse. On its website, Valor offers translations of the site’s content in eleven different languages including Uzbek, Amharic, and Somali and boast that 70 percent of its students “identify as BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).

In a Banner report from last November on Valor’s generous accommodations, reporter Lillian Avedian details an incident in which the principal of Martin Luther King Jr. High School, Dr. Angela McShepard-Ray, announced during a Friday schoolwide assembly that it was permissible for the Muslim students to leave the auditorium in order to pray.

Efforts to cater to Muslim students have sprung up in schools across the Metro area over the past few years. Overton’s Muslim Student Association, the organization which successfully lobbied for cutouts during Ramadan, started two years ago with ten students and has since grown to seventy students.

Prior to the existence of the MSA, the Banner reports that students would have to find places to pray on their own, relaying a story about how a group of students were chased out of a library at Overton by the librarian. “I always remember that librarian getting mad at us for praying,” a student told the outlet. “I’m just wondering, would it have been different if it was a Christian student praying?”   

But the availability of hall passes to leave class and pray, ten classrooms designated as food-free zones, a staff member to oversee the prayer period, and a school-wide iftar with the cafeteria decked out in "Ramadan Mubarak" banners didn’t emerge spontaneously.

The American Muslim Advisory Council is a Nashville-based 501(c)3 that explicitly advocates for allowances for Muslim students around dress code, prayer times, and special treatment during Ramadan. Their suggestions even go so far as to suggest that teachers pass out reading materials and provide instruction for all students on what Ramadan is. AMAC, in conjunction with an Overton staff member, pushed for special treatment for Muslim students at Overton during the holy month. 

An American teacher at a school in Dubai told The Pamphleteer that Muslim students there are not excused from class to pray, despite Muslims comprising a significant share of the student body. Instead, they have open access to a prayer room during breaks. "My experience has been that religious minorities tend to be a bit more 'obtrusive' with their needs," the teacher told us. "That could explain why there is a greater need for visibility at schools in Nashville versus here."

On April 8th, the same week the Overton story broke nationally, the Tennessee House Education Committee voted 12-7 to table Rep. Gino Bulso's Protecting Religious Liberty and Expression in Public Schools Act, for summer study, effectively killing the bill for this session. The bill would have required Tennessee public schools to provide a designated period for voluntary prayer and the reading of religious texts.

Kirk Haston (R-Lobelville) told the committee that accommodating a prayer period would create "scheduling and personnel issues during school hours," warning that "students who are opting out...can't be in the rooms with their instructors at that time, and that leads to having to find other instructors and other school personnel to be with those students."

This is a precise description of what already happens at schools like John Overton High School, Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and Valor Collegiate, where Muslim students leave class simultaneously for 15 minutes of prayer.

The logistical burden that Tennessee legislators cited as a reason to kill a Christian prayer bill is a burden that Nashville's public schools have already absorbed for Muslim students, without legislation, and without apparent controversy until now.