Via Weasel Zippers, I had to read the story twice to figure out what the objection is. Students being forced to say the pledge? No, that’s been unconstitutional for 65 years. Atheists objecting to the “under God” bit being said in a public classroom? Nope, not that either. It’s still an open question legally, but there’s no hint from anyone quoted in the article that it’s an issue here.

The objection appears to be that kids who don’t want to say it might feel peer pressure being surrounded by those who do. The school’s very logical solution? Do everything it can, including physical segregation, to call attention to those students. Nuance:

No one’s for sure when daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance fell by the wayside at Woodbury Elementary School.

But efforts to restore them have erupted into a bitter dispute in this tiny town, with school officials blocking the exercise from classrooms amid concerns that it holds nonparticipating children up to scorn…

Instead, starting last week, a sixth-grade student was assigned to go around to the four classrooms before classes started, gathering up anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium, where he led them in the Pledge…

Friday, the routine changed again.

Just before 8 a.m., [Principal Michaela] Martin herded all the school’s students — and several adults — into a cramped foyer that adjoins the first-floor classrooms and told sixth-grader Nathan Gilbert, 12, to lead them in the Pledge…

In an interview, Martin said the point of having the whole school gather for the Pledge was to protect children who don’t participate in it.

“If you’re in a classroom with 15 students and you choose not to say the Pledge, it’s much more obvious than a group setting. When they’re saying it in a group of 55, it may not be so obvious. We don’t want to isolate children,” she said.

There is a religious element to this case, I think, albeit subtextually. One of the legacies of banning prayer in schools is paranoia at any hint of religious indoctrination; an atheist who can’t resist joining the choir when people around him pray was never much of an atheist to begin with, but a total ban on prayer is at least legally defensible given the special worry about state religion in the First Amendment. The school apparently wanted to adapt that zero-tolerance anti-indoctrination principle to a situation where there, er, isn’t zero tolerance (since they did, after all, retain the pledge). Hence the idiocy of the initial outcome: An honest to goodness quarantine of the non-pledging students in the morning to isolate them from the sort of scorn they’d surely be subjected to later. And the idiocy of the eventual compromise solution, which is decidedly not zero tolerance: What better way to make dissenters feel comfortable than to turn the daily pledge into a mass gathering/panopticon aimed squarely at their own anxiety?

Apropos of nothing, here’s Megyn Kelly and Michael Newdow completely misunderstanding what the case is about yesterday on Fox. Exit question: Has there been some sort of wave of schoolyard beatings for not saying the pledge that I haven’t heard about? The “just stand there and don’t say it if you don’t want to” rule seems to have worked okay for the last six and a half decades.