The California Department of Education has ruled that a middle school teacher in Ventura County presented material about Islamic Sharia Law that was discriminatory and biased.
In January, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles chapter filed an appeal on behalf of a Ventura County family whose son received instructional material taken from an anti-Muslim website that berated Islam and Muslims, as part of a seventh-grade social studies class.
The sheet of paper distributed by the teacher states Sharia Law, or Islamic religious law, gives Muslim men sexual rights over any woman or girl not wearing the hijab, or head scarf; allows a man to marry an infant girl and consummate the marriage when she is 9; and requires Muslims to lie to non-Muslims to advance their faith.
The material was taken from the website billionbibles.com, which CAIR representatives say, aims to promote Christianity by denigrating Islam.
In its decision issued Monday, March 5, the department ordered the Mesa Union School District, located in the unincorporated town of Somis, to take corrective steps including providing five one-hour counseling sessions to the affected student, training its social studies teachers at the school to ensure that their lessons don’t promote religious discrimination, reviewing its anti-bullying policy and organizing events for students emphasizing tolerance of cultural and religious differences.
The district intends to take these steps, said Superintendent Jeff Turner. In an issued statement, he said the district hired an independent attorney-investigator to look into the religious discrimination allegations when they were made in October.
Turner said the district did determine that the material used by the teacher “was not consistent with our expectations and should not have been used.” But, he added that the lesson was not “improperly motivated by religious discriminatory intent.”
There was also no evidence to support claims of bullying or that a hostile environment was created for the Muslim student at that school, Turner said in his statement.
The boy’s mother, Carolyn Rodriguez-Quddus, said while the department’s decision is a “breath of fresh air,” her son has suffered emotional trauma as a result of his humiliating experience and that justice hasn’t been served because the teacher who distributed the material continues to teach at the school, in the same classroom, without facing any consequences.
Rodriguez-Quddus and her husband, however, have taken their son out of that school and he is now attending another public school 20 miles away.
“Our lives have been forever altered,” she said. “I’m also concerned for the other kids in that class who were taught this divisive, extremist content.”
Rodriguez-Quddus said the department’s decision “is a step in the right direction.”
“But it still doesn’t change the fact that the school district decided to protect the teacher and not our son or the other impressionable students who were in that class,” she said.
CAIR’s California chapter released a report in October which found that Muslim students statewide are bullied at a rate that is more than twice the average of Muslim youths nationally. The same study also found an increase statewide of bullying of Muslim youth by their teachers.
The decision is a significant victory for civil rights advocates because it clarifies that such actions on the part of classroom teachers are discriminatory, said Patricia Shnell, a civil rights attorney with CAIR-LA.
“Now, we have more of an indication as to what is acceptable and what is not,” she said.
