A coalition of parents in northern California has sued the Palo Alto Unified School District for a high school field trip to a mosque in the fall of 2025. “Students allegedly were encouraged to wear Islamic religious attire, were given Qurans, observed prayer, engaged with participants in a Quran-memorization program, and were exposed to messaging that portrayed Islam as uniquely aligned with social justice work,” the August 7 complaint declares. Strikingly, not a single family involved in the lawsuit is Christian.

The field trip took place as part of Palo Alto High School’s “Social Justice Pathway,” a three-year course track for sophomores through seniors. The program just happens to share its initials (SJP) with Students for Justice in Palestine, a college organization expelled from some campuses for its extreme pro-Hamas demonstrations in 2024. The SJP program “has periodically and repeatedly organized field trips to a mosque at the Muslim Community Association — Bay Area [in nearby Santa Clara], the only house of worship included in the program,” according to the complaint.

Central to the complaint is the challenge to “a public-school district’s sponsorship and facilitation of religious activity and elevation of Islam vis-à-vis other faiths.” Among other offenses, “Female students were provided hijabs to wear,” and “all students were gifted Qurans to take home for personal use.”

Additionally, “students allegedly were exposed to Zahra Billoo, who is a controversial speaker known for publicly documented hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews and sharply ideological political views,” the complaint continued. “Plaintiffs allege that Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”

To make matters worse, “students were photographed in religious attire inside the mosque,” and those “identifiable images of students were later publicly disseminated … for promotional and/or community-facing purposes.”

In all of this, “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,” the complaint continued, “nor were they given a meaningful opt-out.”

Even if parental consent had been obtained, the complaint alleges, “no meaningful, fully informed consent authorizing participation would excuse the school from promoting Islam over and above other faiths.”

“In the school context, where attendance and participation carry coercive pressures for minors, Defendants’ conduct conveyed governmental endorsement of religion,” the complaint declared, “and impermissibly coerced students to participate in or appear to participate in religious exercise.”

In summary, “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,” the complaint alleged.

The impropriety of the trip becomes obvious if one substitutes “Muslim” for “Christian.” Imagine a public school-sanctioned field trip to a church, where high schoolers were given Bibles, and where the pastor delivered an evangelistic message. (The hijab requirement has no direct comparison, since Christianity does not treat women as lesser than men, but perhaps every student received a t-shirt printed with the church’s name and logo.) At the very least, such an outing would generate intense pushback, both from secular parents and from Muslims and those of other religions.

Perhaps surprisingly, none of the plaintiffs mentioned in the lawsuit are Christian. The lawsuit included two Jewish parents of Palo Alto High School (“Paly”) students, a Jewish parent whose child “will soon attend Paly,” and three former Jewish students at Paly. It also included two Jewish community members in Santa Clara County, where the mosque was located, a Hindu parent in Santa Clara County, and a Zoroastrian resident of Santa Clara County. The lawsuit was also joined by “Plaintiff Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area,” an “organization of San Francisco Bay Area community members concerned with preserving religious neutrality in public education.”

The lawsuit justified the participation of plaintiffs whose children were not on the trip by expressing a fear that the mosque field trip would happen again. “This event has happened in the past and on information and belief will happen again in the future,” the complaint stated. “The District’s actions and omissions are ongoing or capable of repetition because the challenged field trips were not isolated and reflect recurring programmatic practices within the Social Justice Pathway.”

Significantly, four Jewish participants in the lawsuit felt the need to join anonymously, “out of fear that public identification would likely lead to legally recognizable forms of personal injury.”

That in itself is shocking commentary on the relative state of religious freedom in America. A public school openly favors Islam. When Jewish parents and students object, they feel they must do so anonymously to avoid injury. Religious freedom is often vilified as an excuse for conservative Christians to grant themselves favors. But here, it protects people of all religions, especially Jews, against the inevitable encroachment of Islam.