One of the most dangerous decisions that a school district can make is to embrace or remain compliant with the hatred of a group of students for their race, ethnicity, or religion. Every student deserves a safe environment to receive an education, but this is not always the prevailing thought among school leadership.
Defending Education found in documents obtained through a public records request that the San Juan Unified School District in California accepted over $175,000 from the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in fiscal 2024. This funding specifically went to items such as Chromebooks, tutoring partnerships, and learning programs for refugee students.
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While this alone is an issue for providing a subset of students with more support than their peers, the most alarming issue is that the district partnered with CAIR to secure this funding. CAIR is an organization that reportedly has connections with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Both Texas and Florida have also designated CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization within the past year.
After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, CAIR’s Executive Director Nihad Awad celebrated. “I was happy to see people breaking the siege … the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense,” he said.
Knowing that CAIR’s leadership has such vitriol for Israel and the likelihood that some students within San Juan schools have connections and possibly even family living there, why would district leadership agree to any partnership or to receive any funding from a group such as this? There is no conceivable way for these students to feel safe or comfortable in their classrooms when CAIR is given access to their schools.
Unfortunately, the school district’s connection with CAIR is much deeper than just receiving funding.
Defending Education also uncovered emails between district employees and CAIR representatives discussing events. In one email from March 2024, a CAIR representative thanked the district for inviting the group to “Starr King’s parent night and the SJUSD Strategic Core planning.” Starr King is a school within the district for elementary and middle school students.
That same email exchange revealed that CAIR has a “6-week Leadership Development program” for students that has already been launched at Starr King. Another email from June 2024 revealed that, at that time, youth from the district were attending CAIR workshops.
Despite the hateful remarks from CAIR’s leadership and the organization’s controversial past, the district had no problem continuing to work with them. This is simply disqualifying for anyone within the district who was involved in this decision-making, but the issue of incompetent leadership does not stop there.
The records that Defending Education received from the public records request also included a document that had a list of names for refugee students within the district, as well as their grade, number of years in the United States, and “home language.” Regardless of whether the district provided this information by accident or on purpose, sharing the private information of students like this is a violation of federal law and gross negligence.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits public schools from providing personally identifiable information of students to third parties without parental consent. Considering that the district’s document matches students’ full names to their home language, this easily fits under the category of personally identifiable information.
The Department of Education explains that a “parent or eligible student shall provide a signed and dated written consent before an educational agency or institution discloses personally identifiable information from the student’s education records.” The San Juan Unified School District clearly broke that law.
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Not only has the school district partnered with an organization that is officially recognized as a terrorist group in multiple states, but the district also provided Defending Education with private student information that we never requested.
The leadership within San Juan schools has proven itself incapable of running a district comprising nearly 40,000 students. If parents can no longer trust the district to provide their children with a safe learning environment, what reason do these parents have to keep their children there? The San Juan Unified School District must apologize and correct course before the damage becomes irreparable.
Casey Ryan is a writer and investigative reporter at Defending Education.
