And this school I'm talking about has 5 periods of 1 hour and 20 minutes, which is way different from CA which had 50 minute periods.

Block scheduling, with five courses each semester? And a total of 10 each school year? Sounds like it. Bane of my daughter's existence. She has a killer semester this time, with all her heavy academic subjects, and she'll go a whole 6 months without a foreign language class.

Freshmen get no study hall and so they have to cut an elective to attend.

But it's still possible to get all one's credits with four courses per semester in such a setup. Senior year won't be quite the cruise it might have been, though.

I wouldn't have been so concerned if the AZ schools hadn't already caused me some good reason. I had firsthand reports from an 8th grade student reported that the science teacher was getting into creationism and when an atheist student confronted the teacher about it, was shouted down in front of the class and called 'close-minded'. The music teacher would choose only religious songs to sing during the holiday choir performance, etcetera.

*heh* Can you say "ACLU"? "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State"? Local Democratic committee people? These are your natural allies in a fight like this. If it bothers you, you must fight to stop it, you know.

It's a far cry from release-time instruction to creationism and sectarian music in the public schools. I would also bet real money that the people who are responsible for Flintstonian zoology classes and music class hymn sings are not LDS members.

That's the real problem with extremely high religious indoctrination in a community, it saturates the public schools with folks who have completely blurred the church/state thing. Environment plays a heck of a role in determining these folks' notions of what is acceptable or not.

Make your case, Tech. Or make common cause with those who have standing to do so. You pay taxes, right? You get to say a few well-chosen words about what goes on. Every damn meeting.

I knew I was in a religious twilight zone when most the churches here are BIGGER than the high schools and some are built on land the size of a CA shopping mall.

I suspect your neck of the woods is only mildly religious in comparison.

Forced tithing apparently pays off big dividends.

Merely a matter of style. And we have those, too, just not in town. We used to have 30 houses of worship, including the one locally-identified non-Christian church. (I refer, of course, to the Catholic church...) and 4 bars. Now we have 35 churches -- they keep splitting off from each other -- and 2 bars, and still people are getting shot. Go figure.

Fight the ignorance and the intolerance, but don't be afraid of the people themselves. You can't afford to be. Run for office. They won't break your legs. Your car windows maybe. That happened here. But it's only glass.