A personal note from Anela:  I needed a full day to process what happened and to reflect on how something like that still happens in a public school district in 2026. What stayed with me most is that this issue now feels even more important than before, because the Board, Superintendent, and administration showed no real interest in engaging with the community they are supposed to serve. They hid behind a policy they did not fully read, fully explain, or fully apply, while a parent stood there asking for help to be heard. And that makes this bigger than just one topic. This is about whether they are willing to serve this community and these children with honesty, respect, and fairness at all.

To the parents who say they are too busy, I understand. We all are. But if we stay too busy to stand up for our kids and ask the adults who serve them to treat them right, we should not be surprised when they learn to stay quiet too.

Please continuing to stand with us. This issue did not start OR end with Ramadan. And after last night, it is even clearer that what families have been experiencing is systemic.

We will keep going until there is a real plan in place. Please keep sharing our voices and our cause! 

------ PETITION UPDATE------

March 24th, Tuesday night’s District 71 Board of Education meeting made one thing even clearer: the problem families have been raising is not just the lack of a Ramadan and Eid accommodations plan. It is the larger pattern of how this district communicates, delays, controls access, and handles community concerns when people show up to be heard.

This meeting is already scheduled late on a school night in an elementary school.

And yet, the Board and administration went into closed session at the start of the meeting, no ETA provided on how long they will be gone. During that time, those of us waiting outside could hear laughter from inside the room for a while, but no meaningful update was given to anyone waiting. Eventually, we had to knock and ask for an ETA, as they remained there for about 55 minutes.

That showed a lack of respect not only for the parents who came, but for everyone who stayed to participate: the 3 teachers or staff members who stayed all day or returned, the 3 parents who came, and the CAIR representative who came in support.

Once the Board finally returned, the public agenda was rushed through quickly before public comment.

Before I began speaking, I asked whether anyone else wanted to speak. The 3 teachers or staff members nodded no, and so did the others present. I then began speaking on behalf of the petition and the community concerns it represents. The other 2 mothers were there as part of that effort and in support.

Here is my full prepared speech.

When my five minutes ended, I wasn't through my entire speech, one of the mothers asked whether I could continue speaking on her behalf because she has difficulty speaking English. She repeated that request more than once. She was also a visibly Muslim hijabi woman, asking for help to be heard on an issue directly affecting Muslim families.

Instead of trying to solve the access issue, they said no. What is especially concerning is how that denial happened.

The president called the time, and passed the policy to show "that I couldn't speak for her." The Superintendent and Vice President both stepped in and relied on only one small part of the policy, repeating the five-minute rule. But Board Policy 2:230 does more than that. It also allows flexibility in unusual circumstances and explicitly encourages groups speaking on the same issue to appoint a spokesperson. See the policy 2.230 Public Participation at School Board Meetings and Petitions to the Board

We trusted what they were saying in the moment. Only later, after reviewing the policy ourselves, did it become clear that they did not present the full rule. They relied on the narrowest part of the policy while ignoring the parts that would have allowed the parent to be accommodated and the issue to be fully heard.

Even more troubling, under that policy, the Board President was the one with discretion on extended time. Yet the Vice President and Superintendent both spoke for him and reinforced the denial. This is not new for the Superintendent, who speaks and shuts down any concerns on behalf of the board, even when they are about him.

That matters.

Because the issue was not simply that a time limit was enforced. The issue was that the only speaker on this topic was cut off, a parent with difficulty speaking English explicitly asked for help, the only proposed way to keep the issue on the record was denied, and no alternative accommodation was offered.

That is not meaningful access. It raises yet another serious concern about failure to uphold the protections and accommodations required in public institutions under the Civil Rights Act, which was exactly the kind of inequity we were there to speak about in the first place.

And the moment did not end there.

A third parent, who is not Muslim and had not planned to speak that night, stood up because of how the Board was handling the meeting. She spoke about feeling unwelcome in school spaces, the lack of transparency around Board meetings and elections, the same delayed closed-session pattern families saw during a major 2023 safety issue, and the larger problem of parents being forced to justify reasonable requests instead of simply being heard.

She also made clear that, as a non-Muslim supporter, she believed religious accommodations should be respected without forcing families to defend themselves. She said plainly that parents should not have to justify their parenting when they request accommodations, and that schools are not there to question reasonable parent requests, but to support children and families. She also said she wanted students to know they belong, and asked that they not be isolated or made to feel ostracized.

That says a lot. And unfortunately, this did not feel new.

This night reminded many of us of a 2023 Board meeting, when families showed up in larger numbers over a major safety concern that had been mishandled by the Board, Superintendent, and principal. At that meeting too, families experienced a long closed session before public participation resumed. The same pattern was visible again here: delay the public, create frustration, and then rush the people who stayed.

This is why the petition is still necessary.

The Board meeting did not resolve the issue. It confirmed it.

Families have been saying for  years that the district’s and the Boards approach has been:

 • vague instead of clear

 • reactive instead of planned

 • inconsistent instead of districtwide

 • dismissive instead of respectful

That same pattern showed up again in public.

We are still asking for:

 • a real, written religious accommodations plan

 • clear parent-facing communication before Ramadan, Eid, and other observances

 • privacy-protecting processes

 • consistent expectations across all staff and settings

 • accountability

 • and a plan that applies not only to Ramadan and Eid, but to all sincerely held religious practices and observances

We are also asking the Board to:

 • acknowledge this failure publicly

 • direct administration to draft a real plan before the next Board meeting

 • share that draft with the impacted community for collaboration and feedback

 • and bring it back in April for a vote as a standing districtwide policy

Thank you!