BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A group of Jewish parents and students are suing the Palo Alto Unified School District for taking a class on a field trip to a mosque.
Palo Alto High School students were allegedly encouraged to wear Muslim religious attire, including hijabs for the girls, and given Qurans as gifts to take home.
They were taught that Islam in particular promotes social justice and were photographed inside the mosque without parent permission, the lawsuit said.
“The 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,” said the lawsuit, filed on Friday in federal court.
The lawsuit was filed by 10 parents, community members and current or former students along with an advocacy group called Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools.
Eight of 10 people suing are Jewish except for Pawan Deshpande, a Hindu parent from Los Altos, and Dinsha Mistree, a Zoroastrian parent from Sunnyvale.
The rest are Paly parents Jafi Lipton and Josh Lehrer, former student Sahsa Ava Lehrer, Jewish community member Linor Levav and four anonymous plaintiffs.
The trip in question was in fall 2025 to the Muslim Community Association’s mosque in Santa Clara.
The trip was part of Paly’s social justice pathway, a three-year program that focus on addressing social problems.
Controversial speaker
Students were “exposed” to Zahra Billoo, “a controversial speaker known for publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views.” the suit said.
Billoo is executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.
“Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision,” the suit said.
The lawsuit was filed by attorney David Rosenberg-Wohl against the district and Principal Brent Kline, alleging the field trips are “coercive school-sponsored religious activity.”
District representatives didn’t return a request for comment on Wednesday.
How could such a thing happen in Palo Alto!? Doesn’t PAUSD care about our young students not to subject them to such falsities as part of their “education” (indoctrination)? This was a reprehensible incident that must not be allowed to recur.
Parents try to teach our youth truth and good moral values and then the public schools (which we PAY FOR) take the children out on a “field trip” like THIS!? Of course the administration and school district board of trustees are legally responsible to answer for this but What inddividuals, teachers or ? are specifically responsible for arranging to do this to the students? Hoping that somebody will find out “the rest of this story” for us (though, of course, it will all come out in court). Thanks!