Is it illegal, NSNS? If so, what law forbids praying at school functions? Anyone who knows the answer to that, please give us a link?
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The US Supreme Court has so far made eight separate rulings from 1952 to 2004 affirming that school-sponsored prayers (a religious activity) in public schools is a violation of the Establishment Clause and constitutionally impermissible. 60 years of Supreme Court precedents on school prayer basically asserts and re-asserts that religion can only have a sharply limited role in our public schools.
Look up: Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Doe, 2000
(in a 6-3 decision) The Court held that the policy allowing the student-led prayer at the football games was unconstitutional. The majority opinion held that the pre-game prayers delivered "on school property, at school-sponsored events, over the school's public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty, and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer" are not private, but public speech. "Regardless of the listener's support for, or objection to, the message, an objective Santa Fe High School student will unquestionably perceive the inevitable pregame prayer as stamped with her school's seal of approval." - Justice Stevens (a Christian, nominated by Gerald Ford)
Look up: Lee v. Weisman, 1992
"As we have observed before, there are heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools. Our decisions in [Engel] and [Abington] recognize, among other things, that prayer exercises in public schools carry a particular risk of indirect coercion. The concern may not be limited to the context of schools, but it is most pronounced there. What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy." - Justice Kennedy (a Christian, nominated by Ronald Reagan) writing for the majority