Students recite the pledge of allegiance before class. RBHS currently requires students to recite the play once a week. If passed, the bill would require the pledge to be said every day.
With recent amendments to  representative Shane Roden’s proposed bill, the Missouri representative feels strongly in it’s abilities to be passed later this year. This bill, which was proposed in the fall, mandates all schools to recite the pledge of allegiance daily. In prior years, the pledge had been at the center of controversy for its usage of religious concepts. The bill is currently being pushed through the voting processes whilst receiving many minor amendments to wording and details in the past couple of weeks.
“The bill was presented by some local high school students who were in a government class and felt this was an important enough issue to contact us and try to get it changed,” Roden said. “Currently the law only requires time for the pledge to be said once a week and their school only does the minimum.”
Claiming that the pledge will help internalize patriotism in kids, Roden thinks it would greatly benefit students to connect with these ideals by reciting it more often. However, freshman Sienna Juhlin thinks the entire act of reciting the pledge is, in itself, useless and time wasting.
“I think [the bill] isn’t okay, [but the pledge] wastes class time, and it’s just boring. You’d have to stand there and say it every single day,” Juhlin said. “I did that in elementary school and that wasn’t fun at all. In fact, a lot of other kids hated it too. I think the original idea behind the whole thing started off as this symbolic activity that joined the school as a community which is nice, but I don’t think it does that at all anymore and is just wasting our time.”
Despite complaints of this nature reaching Roden quite often, the representative is confident that the bill will pass by the end of this year.
“The bill has been voted out of the first committee this week, [and] it will be heard in the select committee next week and then put on the house calendar for perfection and printing where it will be discussed, amended etc,” Roden said. “It will then receive a voice vote and placed on the calendar for Third reading where the bill is voted on the final time and then sent to the senate to go through the same process. I am confident this bill will be passed without any problems this year.”
A strong supporter for reciting the pledge, media center specialist Dennis Murphy said having the pledge in classrooms every day would be a great reminder to students of their countries background and the importance of their support towards it.
“I think this bill is a wonderful idea and that we all need to love our country,” Murphy said. “By reciting the pledge, it brings awareness to the students that they are Americans, and in general I strongly believe in what the pledge is about. By reciting it, I think that it helps internalize the message and allows students to connect with their country more closely.”
Supporters of this bill, such as Murphy and Roden, strongly believe in the messages behind the pledge and are hoping that by saying it more often, students can connect and appreciate their country in a more in depth fashion.
“It lays the foundation for understanding what this country is founded on, as we get older the pledge takes on different meanings for each individual but still the original purpose is to unite us as one,” Roden said. “ It provides a history lesson and when we talk about the pledge we can go back to the creation and reason why they wrote and adopted it.  Most do not know it was written in 1892 as a way to mend the wounds opened from the Civil War and try and help reunite Americans.”