BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
Few people would be against high school students learning about different religions. Visiting a mosque on a high school field trip isn’t a problem, if teachers also take students to a Jewish temple, a Catholic church, a protestant church, a Hindi Mandir and a Zoroastrian temple. Importantly, teachers should remain neutral when discussing the different faiths.
But a lawsuit filed against the Palo Alto Unified School District says teachers at Palo Alto High School went overboard when it came to Islam. Not only did they take them on a field trip to a mosque in Santa Clara, but students were allegedly encouraged to wear Muslim religious attire, including hijabs for the girls, and given Qurans as gifts to take home. Students participated in a Quran-memorization program, the suit claims.
(Can you imagine the howls we would hear in Palo Alto if public school students memorized Bible verses as a class activity. I can hear the shrieking now about “Separation of Church and State …”)
Inflammatory speaker
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the mosque trip was that students had to listen to Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) San Francisco Bay Area. Billoo has a well-documented history of inflammatory public statements against Jews.
For instance, on Feb. 9, 2025, she reposted the statement that “Hamas deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.”
Billoo has also openly praised Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 assault, in which Hamas terrorists murdered over 1,200 people, including women and children, and kidnapped more than 200 others.
The lawsuit claims that Paly Principal Brent Kline and his teachers permitted a heavily biased perspective to be delivered to a captive audience of students without adequate supervision or balancing viewpoints. It seems more like indoctrination than education.
Antisemitism in nearby district
This lapse in administrative responsibility didn’t occur in a vacuum; it comes amid a surge of antisemitism in local educational institutions.
The severe consequences of such negligence were made clear just months ago when the neighboring Sequoia Union High School District settled a major federal antisemitism lawsuit for $325,000. That lawsuit arose from rampant bullying, swastika graffiti, and instances where history teachers used their classrooms to push political propaganda and penalize students who refused to endorse biased views.
The sweeping reforms mandated by the Sequoia Union settlement — which included mandatory staff training, independent pre-reviews of all curriculum materials concerning the Middle East conflict, and explicit policy changes to ban antisemitism — should have served as a stark warning to surrounding districts.
Instead, Palo Alto High School ignored this warning and exposed its students to divisive political and religious figures under the banner of “social justice.”
Aim for neutrality
Public school districts have a fundamental legal and moral obligation to provide a safe, neutral and balanced learning environment. Teaching religion is OK as long as it is done in a neutral way, with each faith getting equal time.
In this fall’s school board campaign, I hope the candidates have a plan to prevent this from happening again.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
I don’t know Brent Kline but he seems to be the opposite of the principal when I went to Paly, an otherwise very nice man named Ray Ruppel. Faced with growing student unrest during the Viet Nam War, Mr. Ruppel and the faculty struggled to keep the lid on while the draft was vacuuming up men by the thousands. In the end, nearly 50,000 U.S. deaths. Now students are being encouraged to keep an open mind about Islamic Jihad. I’m glad Dave Price has expressed a level view of this entire controversy.
What we’re seeing right now is really just a symptom of a much larger challenge facing public schools across California. There’s an ongoing tension between parents who want schools to focus on fact based instruction — math, science, history — and administrators who are under political pressure to adopt ideology driven curriculum, such as certain versions of ethnic studies.
While ideology based curriculum can appear valuable at first glance, it comes with significant risks. These frameworks are rarely standardized and often open to broad interpretation. For example, California currently has two very different ethnic studies models, each reflecting distinct ideological assumptions. That lack of consistency alone creates confusion.
A second problem is that ideology based curriculum depends heavily on how individual teachers interpret it. Personal bias — even unintended — can shape lessons in ways that drift away from academic grounding.
Finally, instructional time is limited. Ideology doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it requires context, nuance, and depth. Without that time, students often end up receiving half formed or oversimplified ideas, which can do more harm than good.
Here’s a simple illustration of how a factual lesson can shift into an ideological one:
COVID 19 Pandemic (2020–2022) Fact based: COVID 19 spread globally beginning in 2020, causing millions of deaths, overwhelming health systems, and prompting lockdowns and vaccine development.
Ideological: The pandemic revealed structural inequities in healthcare and labor, showing how marginalized communities bear disproportionate burdens while governments struggle to balance public health and economic interests.
Even adults — with full access to information, data, and debate — disagree sharply on many current issues. Expecting children to navigate ideological frameworks without the same tools is unrealistic. Ideology based curriculum may have benefits, but the risks and inconsistencies make it far from a guaranteed good.
This is not a symptom but parents who object to a radical Jihadist who supports violence against Jews being put in front of their Children. CAIR is a known terror supporter banned in many states.
I suspect this civil suit will be referred to the DOJ’s civil rights division for investigation. The DOJ takes reports online (just Google the link) and their phone number is 1-202-514-3847.
meeting with a radical Jihad supporter who supports killing Jews is not really about religion. Also, CAIR has been banned in many states for their open support of terrorism.
I hear the school board tonight is going to vote on changing the name of Palo Alto High School to “Palo Alto Madrasa” so as not to offend the vast number of residents who are practicing Muslims.