Wearing a shabby, green Michigan State University baseball cap and lugging what looked like a solid night's worth of homework in his backpack, Dan Shorts leaned against a retaining wall across the street from Mt. Lebanon High School, inhaled the unseasonably warm mid-December air and pledged his allegiance to the flag.
"I feel like it's one of my duties to say (the Pledge of Allegiance) every morning," said Shorts, 16, a Mt. Lebanon junior. "I live in this country. I'm going to show respect for it."
The pledge has been scrutinized in recent years and its constitutionality questioned in court, mostly because Congress added two words -- "under God" -- more than 60 years after Baptist minister Francis Bellamy penned the original version in 1892.
But with a push by grassroots and national leaders for increased patriotism since the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- and a new U.S. citizenship exam emphasizing a greater understanding of the country's ideals to be unveiled early next year -- the Pledge of Allegiance maintains a role in today's society, even if youngsters still might stumble over "indivisible."
"Whether the particular phrasing of the pledge is good, I think the idea of a Pledge of Allegiance is relevant," said Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. "I think it's more of a hot topic now that it was before 9/11."
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1943 ruled that schools could not require students to stand and salute the flag or recite the pledge. No statistics detail how many children decline to say the pledge every day, but Joseph Rishel, who teaches Constitutional history at Duquesne University, believes the number to be few.
"If anything, (the pledge has) been given a breath of new meaning," Rishel said, but added, "Do we really put our hearts and souls in it?"
Pam Strutz's first-graders at Seville Elementary School in the North Hills School District certainly do. Even though some children placed their right hands closer to their shoulders than their hearts, and some gazed around the room while pledging, they belted out an enthusiastic version with little trouble.
"I think it's a good way to start the day," said Strutz, who hung a poster with the words in the classroom early in the school year.
John Boylan, superintendent of the Norwin School District in Westmoreland County, said he believed the pledge takes on added meaning during times of war. That was the case when the United States entered Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, he said.
"The Pledge of Allegiance became more important. The national anthem became more important," Boylan said. "It's a shame you have to go into a crisis for people to realize what they have."
That is particularly true in the Greensburg Salem School District in Westmoreland County, said Jeffrey Mansfield, principal of Amos K. Hutchinson Elementary School. The district mourned members of the Army Reserve's 14th Quartermaster Detachment based in nearby Hempfield who were killed in 1991 in an Iraqi Scud missile attack in Saudi Arabia during the first Persian Gulf War.
"Every student here knows the words (to the pledge)," Mansfield said.
Joyce Doody, executive director of the National Flag Foundation in the Hill District, said the American flag has a legitimate place in classrooms.
"The flag really embodies the ideals of our nation," Doody said. "Sometimes people think the flag represents a particular political party or viewpoint. It doesn't. It represents all of us."
But some parents question whether their children understand what they're pledging to.
"I don't know if, at 7 years old, they can comprehend what (the pledge) means," said Jeanie Barbour, a mother of a second-grader at Highcliff Elementary School in the North Hills School District. "I don't know if they even realize why they say it."
"That obviously could use some attention," said Carol Murray, a mother of three in the Upper St. Clair School District and president of the Parent Teacher Association Council.
To address parents' concerns, some schools include the pledge in civics lessons.
In the Mt. Lebanon School District, elementary school teachers explain the ritual and its meaning, said Steve Bullick, the district's social studies supervisor. The pledge is explained in greater detail in U.S. history class, offered to eighth-graders, Bullick said.
It's in middle school that some students begin testing their right of refusing to recite the pledge, said J.T. Taylor, 18, a junior at Mt. Lebanon.
"Kids use these freedoms, but they don't understand where those freedoms come from," Taylor said, as he sat beside Shorts. "To me, it seems like students take this country for granted."
"They feel this government doesn't represent them," Shorts said. "We're in a time of war. Everybody should be patriotic. You should respect (the Pledge of Allegiance)."
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