In the 1950s when I attended Gowanda Central School, our opening morning exercise included a brief prayer and a pledge to the flag. As the PA system came on, we were asked to stand and recite together this prayer:

“Almighty God – we acknowledge our dependence on thee and ask Your blessing on us, our home, our school and our country. Amen.”

This was immediately followed by our pledge to the flag, after which we were seated and listened to announcements. It was in 1954 that the words “under God” were added to the pledge and in 1956 “In God We Trust” became our country’s motto.

All of this preceded Madalyn O’Hair and her fight to take God and prayer out of the schools. I don’t remember that anyone in school objected to the prayer and pledge, but if they had, more than likely they would have stood quietly and indulged the rest of us. I  remember at least one year when our homeroom teacher broke down both the prayer and pledge and explained phrase by phrase what we were saying to be sure we understood it.

I remember praying the prayer silently in the summertime as my day began. It was a comfortable, familiar “ritual.”

Perhaps it was no coincidence that five or seven students in our class of approximately 109 students became preachers or religious teachers. For the most part, our students were well-behaved. A couple of students got caught chewing gum, and a couple got caught cheating on tests. To my knowledge, only one girl got pregnant in our four years of high school, and two boys were clowning around in the parking lot – one was driving erratically – fishtailing, etc. while another rode on a fender. He fell off and had massive brain injuries, and that was our four years of high school.

Fast forward to today. What was the trade-off? We took prayer out of the schools. It was not just Gowanda. Most public schools had the “universal” prayer. When prayer was taken out, guns and school resource officers were brought in. There was a decline in respect on the part of students. Crude and vulgar language became commonplace.

Bullying is now a major issue. I’m sure we had some bullying too, but not as degrading and damaging as it is now. Some of those classmates that we considered snobs and stuck-up revealed at our tenth reunion that they had the same inferiority complexes that the rest of us had. We found out as we swapped stories that we were all poor, but none of us realized it.

We had our 55th year reunion a couple of years ago and enjoyed ourselves more than in any of the previous years. We are all on equal footing now (some with canes), some heavy, some with no hair or gray hair, but there is a common thread of interest among us, as we moved from table to table catching up.

Several times recently I have tried to recall that prayer but only remembered the first part. At last it has all come back.

As you read it here, perhaps you could petition your school board to incorporate this prayer back into our school day. It could have a lasting effect on our students. If there are any who might find this prayer offensive, perhaps they could just stand quietly and be respectful. Hopefully, this would be followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Rev. Sandra Ball is pastor of Fellowship Church in Brocton.