The families of three teens are suing the School District of Philadelphia for what the plaintiffs say are First Amendment violations related to punishment inflicted on them and one other student after they went into a Muslim prayer room at the Academy at Palumbo and prayed in Hebrew, according to JNS.
Following the events at the school, the students and their families moved out of the district after facing verbal abuse in person and on social media. The lawsuit, filed on Aug. 6, alleges that the school punished the boys before initiating an investigation and without due process and ignored evidence that spoke to their innocence. Two of the four boys are Jewish, although only one of the Jewish students’ families is a plaintiff in the suit.
What is not disputed is that the boys entered a room that was identified by signage as a “quiet room,” which apparently was designated for Muslim prayer, although the lawsuit alleges that there is no evidence that the student body as a whole was ever officially told the room would function exclusively as a space for Muslim students. There was a Palestinian flag on the door visible from outside the room, and the suit notes that the boys observed Muslim decorations once they were inside the room.
Upon entering the prayer room, the boys prayed in Hebrew, with one chanting “Am Yisrael Chai” and another doing a handstand. Students accused the boys of “trashing” the prayer room, according to JNS, a charge that the boys deny. Not long after leaving, the boys’ actions became a source of conflict among the student body, with numerous nonviolent altercations occurring in the wake of the events.
According to JNS, the three boys who were students at the Academy at Palumbo were suspended for sneaking the fourth boy, a former student, into the school.
There are also much more egregious allegations that the boys deny: The school’s principal, Kiana Thompson, told the mother of the former student that the boy engaged in “sexually stimulated or suggestive dances or maneuvers,” tore down posters and shouted that he hated Muslims. The suit says that one of the boys removed a sign from the wall and “gently placed it on the floor, where he left it leaning against the wall.”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project, filed the complaint on behalf of the families. She said that these rumors were baseless and led to the families moving out of the district.
“All told, the statements from the alleged victims didn’t make any of the claims that were part of the rumors, and the rumors were exacerbated by agents of the school district, including a teacher from another school who sat down at the public comment table before the school board two days later — knowing it had not yet been investigated — and told a lurid story of intentional desecration of Muslim religious accouterments and attacks on Muslim girls that never happened, but she did that publicly. She wasn’t stopped by the school board. It was live streamed. The boys’ names were released on social media, including by teachers of the school district,” Lowenthal Marcus said in an interview with Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
The incident in question occurred on June 11, 2024, although tensions at the school had been building before that date. Shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, a Muslim student told one of the Jewish students that he “will kill [him] and everybody in Israel,” according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit also claims that that same student wrote “I heart Hamas” on a whiteboard and held it up in class.
Two days after the incident in the prayer room, the families of the four boys tried to meet with Thompson, but were told she would only meet with one of the students and his parents, who had already scheduled an appointment that day, before asking security to escort the rest of the group off campus.
When a parent emphasized the importance of meeting promptly due to the threats to the boys’ safety that they were receiving on social media, the principal “[laughed] out loud, [tilted] her head to the side, and [stated] ‘Well, there’s multiple sides to that story,’” according to the suit.
Lowenthal Marcus said that the fact that this prayer room existed in itself is an issue that should raise alarm to parents in the district and beyond.
“There is a clear space in a public high school into which obviously any non-Muslim who dares to come in and pray a Jewish prayer, or I suppose a Christian prayer, would be punished … it’s the official policy of the school to protect that space and keep it segregated for Muslims only. That is so against the First Amendment of the Constitution of our country.
Everybody’s eyes should have come out of their heads,” she said. “But instead, the response was to protect it and punish the boys for daring to defile that room with their presence.”
She added that the aim of the lawsuit is to create a more welcoming environment in the district, as well as one that doesn’t violate laws by providing spaces for certain groups of people and not others. She also said that the leaders who made the decisions that led to the families feeling that they needed to relocate must be held accountable.
“There’s a lot of healing that has to go on, and the school district needs to ensure that the people they put in positions of leadership understand their legal obligations to their students,” Lowenthal Marcus said.
Monique Braxton, the deputy chief of communications for the school district, told Philadelphia Jewish Exponent that the district doesn’t comment on active or pending lawsuits.
According to the suit, the students were no longer able to attend the school “without exposing [themselves] to death or serious bodily injury.”
Each of the students left the school and the district following the events.
“These families weren’t shattered, because they are all strong, loving families — but they were traumatized by the idea that their sons were in physical danger in their own communities, and that the response from the school was not only to blame their sons, but when the families all showed up to meet with the principal, to throw them out,” Lowenthal Marcus said. “They moved from the place where they had lived for decades and had to move out to a place where they didn’t know other people and had no other family around.
They had to put their boys in a totally different school in the middle of high school. I had many conversations with the families, many of which were trying to calm them down and help them believe that there is a way out of this and that there would be an end to this trauma.”
aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com
