Parents Sue California School District Over Field Trip to Mosque
“According to the complaint, students were encouraged to don Islamic religious attire, given Qurans to take home, and observed a midday prayer service.”
I don’t understand why the parents agreed to let their kids go on this trip in the first place.
The Daily Wire reports:
Parents Sue School District Over Mosque Field Trip, Claim Religious Indoctrination
A group of parents is suing the Palo Alto Unified School District and Brent Kline, principal of Palo Alto High School, in federal court, alleging the school’s “Social Justice Pathway” turned a class field trip to a Santa Clara mosque into taxpayer-funded religious indoctrination.
The suit, filed August 7 in the Northern District of California, centers on a fall 2025 visit to the Muslim Community Association mosque in Santa Clara. According to the complaint, students were encouraged to don Islamic religious attire, given Qurans to take home, and observed a midday prayer service.
Ten individual plaintiffs and an advocacy group, Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools — San Francisco Bay Area, brought the case. Eight are Jewish; the Hindu and Zoroastrian plaintiffs live in neighboring communities and do not have children enrolled at Palo Alto. The complaint alleges that the mosque is the only house of worship the program visits, and alleges its website has promoted both the school visits and local religious conversions.
“[T]he District failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy, and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event,” the filing claims.
The Pathway is a three-year course track open to Palo Alto High students beginning sophomore year. The complaint alleges that during the mosque visit, students were exposed to Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom the filing describes as a “controversial outside speaker with publicly documented hostile statements concerning Jews.” Billoo, the suit says, “was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
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Comments
Absolutely. The parents should sue unless the school also included trips to a Protestant church, a Catholic church, a Jewish synagogue, a Hindu temple, a Buddhist temple, etc., which the school obviously had no plans to do. I wonder when kids will start being banned from school for wearing a cross necklace.