Editor\u2019s note: Names of students who attended the 2025 field trip to the Santa Clara Muslim Community Association are presented as pseudonyms due to the sensitive nature of the field trip and wide-spanning media coverage of the event.<\/p>\n
A lawsuit filed against the Palo Alto Unified School District over a field trip that allegedly \u201cconveyed preference for one religion and disfavored or stigmatized others<\/a>\u201d has picked up significant media attention over the past few days.<\/p>\n As a student in the Social Justice Pathway, the program that undertook the field trip, I want to share critical context and information that the lawsuit either does not include or misrepresents.<\/p>\n The 16-page federal court document published by the Palo Alto Daily Post last week includes 86 paragraphs, and I have no interest in individually addressing every point brought up in the complaint. In fact, I think some valid concerns are raised. What I do have an interest in, however, is ensuring that the conversation surrounding this mosque field trip doesn\u2019t exclude the perspectives of the very students who attended it.<\/p>\n The field trip to the Santa Clara Muslim Community Association took place during the first semester of the 2025-26 school year, when our class was taking Humanities. Almost half of this course was centered around the religion unit. In this unit, we wrote essays and gave presentations on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Bahaism and Taoism. This is to say, the field trip to the mosque was part of a broader educational effort on religion.<\/p>\n I did not attend the field trip (which I was not penalized for) because of illness, but the majority of my peers in SJP did. What they said to me in interviews this week is that claims presented in the lawsuit, which also named Paly Principal Brent Kline, lack significant information and nuance.<\/p>\n The lawsuit alleges the field trip \u201cexposed students to foreseeable discriminatory and ideological messaging, and failed to protect students from unequal treatment based on religion<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryan, a senior who went on the field trip, said he rejects that claim.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the first things that they told us when we got there was that \u2026 if you practice other religions or don\u2019t partake in a religion, that\u2019s totally fine,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cThe purpose of the field trip was to learn and see things about a different religion, but they didn\u2019t try to make their religion seem supreme compared to others or try to belittle other types of religions that people practice.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryan also said that although the Santa Clara Muslim Community Association did share about its social justice work \u2014 by nature a good fit for our SJP program \u2014 Islam was not posited as \u201cuniquely aligned<\/a>\u201d with social justice as the lawsuit claims.<\/p>\n \u201cThey didn\u2019t specifically say that Islam is such a social justice religion, but they just showed that they can practice social justice through their religion,\u201d Ryan said.<\/p>\n The idea of the intersection between social justice and religion was explored in class through each of the seven religions we studied, and was not an idea specifically taught in relation to Islam. During our religion unit, we also did not shy away from the conflicts between certain social justice values and aspects of many religions, including Islam.<\/p>\n Tommy, a senior who went on the field trip, said he recognized these conflicts while visiting the prayer rooms at the mosque.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was definitely a learning experience because I had never really known that prayer rooms were separate between men and women because I\u2019ve been Christian Catholic my whole life,\u201d Tommy said. \u201cA lot of what we learn about SJP promotes more values of equality, and it\u2019s kind of hard to have that when you\u2019re segregating the men from the women. It\u2019s interesting to see, and I was just observing; that\u2019s what the whole field trip was about.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuit\u2019s claim that the field trip was \u201cencouraging or requiring students to don religious attire\u201d has been made a central point of a lot of the news coverage, with it even making it into the headline in articles from the New York Post<\/a> and The Times of Israel<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marina, a senior who went on the field trip, however, said the covering of hair for women was only encouraged in sensitive prayer areas, which were optional to enter.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone had a choice if they wanted to take their shoes off and go in or not,\u201d Marina said. \u201cI just put my hair under my hoodie. \u2026 You didn\u2019t have to go inside to that area, and I didn\u2019t end up wearing the hijab anyways.\u201d<\/p>\n In an interview with The Paly Voice, David Rosenberg-Wohl, the attorney representing the plaintiffs behind the lawsuit, said SJP inherently prioritized Islam over other religions by visiting the Muslim Community Center and not other religious sites.<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t have to actually have someone say \u2018This is only true of Islam,\u2019 but it is nonetheless true that that is what the school chose to feature,\u201d Rosenberg-Wohl said. \u201cThe school did not choose to go to a church. The school did not choose to go to a synagogue. The school chose to highlight a connection that it wished to make between one faith and a political course of study.\u201d<\/p>\n I can certainly understand skepticism about why Islam was the only religion highlighted in a field trip. After all, it can be argued that if you can\u2019t show every religion through a field trip, none of them should be shown. I would say, however, that considering the hands-on learning goals of SJP, this binary perhaps isn\u2019t realistic. During our immigration unit, for example, we visited Angel Island to learn about the origins of California\u2019s Asian immigrant community. I suspect you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find anyone interpreting that trip as the school assigning some elevated social justice standard to Asian immigrants specifically.<\/p>\n By Rosenberg-Wohl\u2019s reasoning, though, you\u2019d have to. You would also have to say SJP placed special social justice importance on the seven religions we studied in class by not studying, say, Shintoism or Zoroastrianism. Visiting a place to learn about it isn\u2019t the same as putting it on a pedestal, even if you don\u2019t visit everywhere else too.<\/p>\n According to Marina, it is important to remember the role that field trips play in Social Justice Pathway learning.<\/p>\n \u201cIn SJP, we have field trips when we have the resources and opportunity to actually see that in person, to gain that experience,\u201d Marina said.<\/p>\n There is one concern expressed in the lawsuit that I do not wish to dismiss: the presence of Zahra Billoo, a civil rights attorney and executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations\u2019 Bay Area chapter. Past statements of hers have been called hateful by the Anti-Defamation League, and I likewise believe many of her past statements to be grossly inappropriate. I understand it may not be realistic to vet every person that a class is exposed to, but the field trip could have easily been enjoyed without her presence.<\/p>\n Despite my belief that Billoo should not have been part of the field trip, it is important to highlight that Billoo\u2019s exposure to students was limited in its scope.<\/p>\n According to Katherine, a senior who went on the field trip, Billoo talked about her role in legally defending victims of Islamophobia before taking questions at the end.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember that she was a lawyer and that she specialized in doing Islamic discrimination cases,\u201d Katherine said. \u201cFor a bit she did a Q&A of just general questions about Islam, and then she was mostly talking about how the mosque center is a place where people can get legal help if they are facing discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n With the plaintiff\u2019s version of the lawsuit as the only information available in most media for the past week, reactionary coverage of the lawsuit has spread worldwide. Posts by right-wing news aggregators on social media are accruing millions of views<\/a> claiming that girls were forced to wear hijabs, and conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro shared a post<\/a> characterizing the field trip as \u201ctaxpayer-funded religious indoctrination.\u201d<\/p>\n The vast majority of the people demonizing the teachers who arranged and chaperoned this field trip simply don\u2019t know them. The idea that they would be working to indoctrinate students into Islam, or any religion, is an idea extremely foreign to me as a student who has had them as my teachers for the past two years. But this narrative is nonetheless dominating media coverage of the event.<\/p>\n With this level of attention toward SJP\u2019s mosque field trip \u2014 all coming from one perspective \u2014 it\u2019s necessary to get other voices involved. And once you consider these first-hand accounts from my peers and me, it becomes clear that this lawsuit against PAUSD is missing vital information. This is not to say the lawsuit doesn\u2019t bring up fair concerns. I think there is a fair argument to be made that there should not have been a photo published of students at the religious site. I am also disappointed that the trip ended up platforming Zahra Billoo.<\/p>\n However, the limited perspective of the lawsuit and the resulting media onslaught toward this field trip should certainly be presented with more nuance. I hope my peers and I have helped provide that.<\/p>\n