Ten parents, community members and former students have taken Palo Alto Unified to federal court over a fall 2025 high school field trip to a Santa Clara mosque, alleging the district turned a lesson about Islam into an endorsement of it.

The suit, filed Aug. 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is not the usual church-state fight. The plaintiffs aren't objecting to their own faith being sidelined so much as arguing that a public school elevated one religion above all others — and the coalition bringing the claim spans Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian families. It puts Palo Alto High's "Social Justice Pathway," its principal, and the Bay Area's most prominent Muslim civil-rights leader at the center of an Establishment Clause case the district says it hasn't even been formally served with yet.

The trip happened in fall 2025, when students in Palo Alto High's Social Justice Pathway — a three-year elective open to students beginning sophomore year — visited the Muslim Community Association's mosque on Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara. According to the complaint, first reported by the SF Chronicle and detailed in the local press, students were given Qurans to take home, girls were offered head scarves to wear, and the group was told that Islam promotes social justice. Students also spent time with the mosque's Quran-memorization youth program, Noor Hifz Academy, and were photographed inside the building — the plaintiffs say without parents' permission.

The families organized themselves as a group focused on religious neutrality in public schools. Among the ten plaintiffs are Palo Alto High parents Jafi Lipson and Josh Lehrer and former Paly student Sasha Ava Lehrer, all Jewish; a Hindu parent from Los Altos, Pawan Deshpande; a Zoroastrian from Sunnyvale, Dinsha Mistree; and Linor Levav of Stanford. Four more, all Jewish, filed anonymously, saying public identification could expose them to harm. The Palo Alto Daily Post, which first reported the filing, identified the plaintiffs' attorney as David Rosenberg-Wohl.

The legal theory is sweeping. The complaint names the district and Principal Brent Kline as defendants and characterizes the outing as coercive, school-sponsored religious activity that ran afoul of the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection guarantee and the California Constitution. In effect, the plaintiffs argue a public school can teach about a religion but crossed the line into favoring one — leaving families of other faiths stigmatized. That is the classic architecture of an Establishment Clause claim, and here it is being pressed not by secular objectors but by observant families of three different traditions.

Much of the plaintiffs' fire is aimed at a guest speaker: Zahra Billoo, who runs the Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and reportedly addressed the students. The suit describes her as a divisive figure with a record of statements hostile to Jews and says she was allowed to speak without a balancing viewpoint or adequate supervision. CAIR has been a flashpoint in Palo Alto before: in 2024, the city walked back a grant for a multi-faith picnic after the organization joined as a co-sponsor.

Superintendent Jason Glass has kept the district's public posture deliberately narrow. He said Palo Alto Unified learned of the suit through news coverage and has not yet verified the allegations. "Instruction about religion in our schools must be academic, not devotional. No faith may be promoted, and no faith may be denigrated," Glass said in a statement. "Every family in this district is entitled to expect that standard, and I will review our practice against it." He added that the district would not comment further on pending litigation.

What the filing does not yet contain is the district's own account — what the field trip was designed to teach, how it was supervised, and whether the head scarves and Qurans were framed as gifts or as classroom materials. Those details, more than the controversy around CAIR, are usually what an Establishment Clause case turns on, and none have been tested in court. For now there is a complaint, a set of allegations, and a district that says the papers haven't reached it.