SANTA CLARA, California (LifeSiteNews) – California parents are suing Palo Alto Unified School District and Palo Alto High School Principal Brent Kline after students were allegedly pushed to participate in Muslim religious practices, including donning hijabs, during a field trip to an area mosque.
The Daily Wire reports that the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools is representing a group of Jewish parents, plus Hindu and and Zoroastrian plaintiffs from neighboring communities, over a fall 2025 field trip to Santa Clara’s Muslim Community Association mosque, reportedly the only religious worship site visited under the school’s Social Justice Pathway program.
Minor students “allegedly were provided with Muslim religious attire and encouraged to wear it while on site,” according to the lawsuit. “During that visit, students allegedly were provided with Qurans and taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice.” They were also photographed and “publicly posted for promotional and/or community-facing purposes.”
“Plaintiffs allege that parents were not provided meaningful, fully informed consent authorizing their children’s participation in religiously inflected activity, photography inside a religious institution, or the public dissemination of their children’s images in that context, nor were they given a meaningful opt-out,” the suit alleges, arguing that “no meaningful, fully informed consent authorizing participation would excuse the school from promoting Islam over and above other faiths.”
The suit further maintains students were exposed to speaker Zahra Billoo, whom it maintains is “known for publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views.” FrontPageMagazine notes that Billoo is executive director of the Bay Area office for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has long faced allegations of links to terrorist groups.
In response to local media, Billoo dismissed the lawsuit as “misguided,” and Superintendent Jason Glass said the district was reviewing its practices and that religion-related instruction is supposed to be academic rather than devotional.
Especially in far-left states like California, the U.S. public education system has long been recognized as heavily compromised by left-wing bias and identity-based grievances, framing religious, racial, and sexual minorities as perennial underdogs in a nation “systemically” rigged to favor a white, heterosexual, Christian patriarchy, with identity groups forming the foundation of so-called “social justice” and “intersectional” approaches to education.
Islam enjoys a particularly favored status in the woke identity hierarchy, but so does LGBT status, sometimes leading to tensions and double-standards within the leftist world.
Islam holds that homosexuality is a grave sin punishable by death, and to this day, majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East subject homosexuals to criminal penalties, violence, and abuse unheard of in the West. Yet liberals tend to hold this record to a strikingly different standard than they do to mainstream Christian and conservative views on homosexuality, commonly branding as “hateful” those who reject homosexual activity as sinful while nevertheless treating individuals with homosexual inclinations humanely.