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HAMILTON, Ontario, September 20, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Parents of faith concerned about anti-religious school environments have been given assistance by a newly developed declaration.  The document sets out the rights of parents to have their religious beliefs respected and not infringed upon by anti-Christian school curriculum and ideas.  The Hamilton-Wentworth Family Action Council, after years of study, has formulated a document known as the Declaration of Spiritual Values. The purpose of the document is to help parents inform teachers about those core beliefs that parents find important for the education of their child. It lists areas which parents want to have excluded from their child’s learning curriculum, while extolling the positive values upon which these exclusions are based.

The Declaration of Spiritual Values achieves a number of goals. First, it makes clear to the educators where the parents want to “draw the line”, without doing so in a judgmental or critical way. Second, as a prepared document, the Declaration of Spiritual Values provides parents with a simple means to enter into dialogue with educators about their spiritual and moral values, which makes it a useful assistant for parents who find it difficult to articulate their beliefs and their child’s needs.  The Declaration of Spiritual Values, when used in the spirit in which it has been developed, can be used to help parents and teachers reach an amicable agreement about the course of the child’s education. It can also help educators become more tolerant of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs of their students’ families, in a firm yet non-threatening way. HWFAC recommends that parents seek to have the Declaration of Spiritual Values included in their child’s education record, so that this statement of their beliefs will follow and continue to influence the child’s path of learning throughout their time in the Public School system.

It includes a cover letter written to the educator, and a glossary of terms to help both the parents and school authorities to understand clearly the tenets of the document.

The Declaration of Spiritual Values document can be obtained by from the HWFAC website here:  https://www.hamiltonfamilyaction.org/Education/Declaration/LetterDSVNotes.pdf

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