California School District Sued After Mosque Field Trip

Last fall, a group of students at Palo Alto High School took a field trip to a local mosque, meeting the mosque’s imam and a Muslim civil rights lawyer. The students observed Dhuhr prayers, listened to passages from the Qur’an and were given Qur’ans as gifts. Female students also were encouraged to wear hijabs, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by some parents and students.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court by Jewish, Hindu, and Zoroastrian parents and students, claims Palo Alto Unified School District violated both students’ First Amendment rights and state laws requiring religious neutrality.

The lawsuit is raising questions about where the line is drawn between education about religion and religious indoctrination.

The trip was part of the high school’s Social Justice Pathway curriculum, a three-year track beginning in students’ sophomore year. A recruitment video highlights field trips to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the former immigration station on Angel Island, and it includes photographs of students during a prior trip to the mosque.

The plaintiffs belong to a group called Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools–San Francisco Bay Area.

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The plaintiffs also contend that Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, spoke to students unchallenged, even though she had previously made “publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views.”

In 2021, she referred to the Anti-Defamation League, chapters of Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America, and “Zionist synagogues” as “enemies” for supposedly stoking Islamophobia, according to news reports.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to bar the school district from religious activities without parental consent and to institute new policies on photographing students and vetting speakers. The lawsuit claims students were photographed wearing religious attire without parental consent, and that the mosque later posted the photos online. Rosenberg-Wohl said some of the photos were removed after the lawsuit was filed.

Both the mosque and some Palo Alto students disputed some of the claims in the lawsuit—including that all students were given Qur’ans as gifts and that the school program, by only visiting a mosque, was giving preferential treatment to Islam. The mosque’s communications director, Mongi Dhaouadi, said staff simply left the books on a table at the back of the hall for anyone who wanted to take one home.

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