I lived in St. Louis during my 4-7th grade years and remember the Gideons coming and distributing the New Testament pocket books. (We also had a moment of prayer at the beginning of the school year during those years.) What I don’t recall is whether the Gideons proselytized (sp?) at the time of the distribution. I also don’t recall whether the Plan of Salvation was included.
To avoid the appearance of religious bias maybe they should have a table where books, including the Koran, be kept and students could take one or all as they saw fit.
I don’t believe that in my large suburban school district they handed out copies of the NT, however.
Regardless, the knowledge, understanding and appreciation stayed after the presentation.
We saw the school district as supporting established institutions, rather than tearing them down. And the local Gideons saw the importance of sharing their work of distributing bibles in hotels, motels and public spaces for ready use as further communicated to those who might use it in later life.
We likewise had charitable groups of all sorts explain what they do and we thought this made sense as an educational function.
We had Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed Jews and perhaps a Hindu or two in our school and thought nothing of hearing about the functions of various institutions.
We would have been surprised if a bible was handed out by one group or another. If the Jewish groups that attended assemblies had distributed items that would have surprised us as well.
We were ten or eleven and we understood that you went to church or synagogue to hear the details of your faith and practice it.
The public school district was right in letting the Gideons explain the nature and works of their group and wrong in letting distribution of bibles be a part of that presentation.
If given the choice of asking for the reactionary change of privatizing all schools tomorrow or mildly reforming schools to more like they were in the fifties, I will take the later as more sensible.