“While there has been no specific threat of harm to students, schools and school offices will be closed Friday, December 18, 2015,” Augusta County Public Schools said in a statement Thursday, noting the “voluminous phone calls and electronic mail” it had received “locally and from outside the area.”
The controversy ignited after parents learned that World Geography teacher Cheryl LaPorte had required her ninth-grade students at Riverheads High School in Staunton to copy the shahada, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, as part of an assignment on world religions.
Reciting the shahada is the first step in converting to Islam.
The passage translated from Arabic states: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”
LaPorte also invited her female students to try on headscarves, the Shilling Show first reported.
“Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion, or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief,” Superintendent Eric Bond said in a statement.
But Bond’s reassurances did not assuage the 100 parents and community members who attended a forum at the Good News Ministries Church near the school to protest the assignment and point out that a public school teacher who required students to copy passages from the Bible would be fired, the Staunton News Leader reported.
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And that's absolutely true. A teacher having students recite biblical passages would have been fired, especially if some of the students had been Muslim.
ReplyDeletePracticing "calligraphy", is irrelevant to a World History class. But what really gives away her true intentions, is that Arabic script, is written right to left...not left to right as an American student learning calligraphy would do.