NEW YORK — An attorney representing the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, scaled the steps of City Hall yesterday to oppose the new Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), a public school that opened this week in Brooklyn.
Rooney said the city has refused to provide information about the school’s curriculum, textbooks, teachers and affiliated groups. He said his organization “will continue to use the courts to get information” and will monitor the school “to ensure that it comports with state and federal law.”
Attorney David Yerushalmi filed a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in late July.
“We are concerned that the city is setting up a segregated, separate but equal public school system: one for Islam and another for everyone else,” Rooney said.
The school is the first in the city to offer instruction in Arabic and on Arabic culture, but it is not the first to offer foreign language instruction or to offer culturally oriented academic units.
The same week Yerushalmi filed his FOIA request, educators at the Khalil Gibran school described its curricula, text books and diverse group of certified teachers to the Daily Eagle. A spokeswoman at Rooney’s organization had not read the Eagle article and no one there was able to comment on it by press time yesterday.
Rooney argued that the school’s failure to answer his demand means that it would not meet state education standards and raises “suspicions that KGIA is an anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish propaganda center operating as a public school.”
Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the center said the school “lends itself to subtle and covert influence of these young impressionable children.”
The school’s supporters see the criticism as a reason why the school is necessary. “It’s a school for everyone,” Lena Alhusseini, executive director of the Arab American Family Support Center, told the Brooklyn Eagle last spring.
“The more people learn about what the vision of the school is, the more they see it has nothing to do with politics. It’s about tolerance, giving students a new language skill they can use in many international fields such as finance, and giving them a rigorous education. It’s for everyone. It wouldn’t succeed if it weren’t diverse.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues.
So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net
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