Standing Up for the Right to Sit Down

Smith replied that students would feel singled out if told to leave the room, that he felt the novelty of sitting during the pledge would probably wear off, and that it's not the job of teachers to proselytize to students.

Disputes over the pledge periodically surface in school systems across the country. A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that a Pennsylvania law requiring schools to notify parents if students abstain from the pledge was unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard a case last year brought by a California atheist who objected to his daughter's saying the pledge because it contained the words "under God." The Supreme Court didn't address the constitutionality of the issue but ruled that the man lacked legal standing to file suit on his daughter's behalf because he didn't have full custody of the child.

Claudette Smith of Essex, Md., said her two children in the Baltimore County school system have been told they have to either stand or recite the pledge. Her daughter, an 11th-grader at Chesapeake High School, was told by three separate teachers that she was being disrespectful by remaining seated during the pledge.

"I just think that the schools and their staffs, as well as their students, should be educated in the fact that they don't have to stand . . . if they don't want to, and it's really nobody's business why," Smith said.

For Theodore Pugh, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance was less a political statement and more an expression of rights, he said.

And besides upholding his classmates' rights, his pledge protest worked well for him, too.

"My friends were very impressed with me," he said.