Two non-Jewish teens and their families had to move out of the School District of Philadelphia, which enrolls nearly 200,000 students in 331 schools, after they and two Jewish teens faced backlash for entering a “quiet room,” which the Academy at Palumbo turned out to reserve exclusively for Muslim students to pray, according to a federal lawsuit.
The public school violated First Amendment rights in two ways, according to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project. The alleged “Muslim-only prayer room” discriminates against non-Muslim students, and the school used Jewish prayers that the boys recited in the room as “a basis for disciplinary action and justification for claiming harassment of Muslim girls,” she told JNS.
“It’s a stunning, insane story,” Marcus said.
On June 11, 2024, the non-Jewish student—identified as M. Danowitz—visited the Academy at Palumbo, where he had studied the previous year before transferring to a different school. Final exams had ended at the school, but classes were ongoing for a few days to fulfill requirements under state law.
At lunchtime, Danowitz, J. Hiester and M. Parmar—both students at the school, the former Jewish—and a fourth student (J2), who went to the school and is Jewish but who isn’t a plaintiff in the litigation, saw that the door was open to what a sign indicated was a “quiet room.”
Although a Palestinian flag hung outside the room, “there is no evidence that the entire school body was ever officially put on notice of the true purpose of the prayer room or about any rules associated with it,” the lawsuit alleges.
When the four walked in, they found two or three girls inside. None was praying. The boys saw some Islamic religious paraphernalia and Arabic-language imagery on the walls, but no religious items.
Danowitz and J2, who are Jewish, prayed in Hebrew in the “quiet room,” prompting the girls to laugh and ask why they were there. Danowitz said he had a right to pray there and is a “proud Zionist,” according to the lawsuit.
J2, who filmed on his phone, chanted “Am Yisrael chai,” the “Nation of Israel lives,” and Danowitz did a handstand, after which the four boys left the room, per the suit.
Marcus told JNS that within half an hour, the boys’ phones “started blowing up.”
“‘Why did you trash the prayer room?’ ‘Why did you go in there’ during girls’ time?” the messages read, according to Marcus. “The boys never approached the girls.”
A Muslim student identified as A. B. in the suit, which stated that A. B. assaulted Hiester before June 11, called Hiester and told him that he “wanted to fight” him and Danowitz. Students close to A. B. sent repeated text messages to Hiester and initiated several audio and video calls, according to the suit.
A. B. and his friends confronted Hiester in a bathroom and asked him why he and his friends “trashed the prayer room,” per the lawsuit. A. B. warned that he and his friends “would do something” to block Hiester from entering the quiet room again, per the suit. (The four boys deny trashing the quiet room.)
Monique Braxton, deputy chief of communications and spokeswoman for the district, told JNS that it doesn’t “comment on active investigations.”
A. B. and five other students surrounded Parmar and J2 in the school’s computer lab and asked them why they were in the quiet room and accused them of trashing it as well.
The Muslim student had told J2 shortly after Oct. 7 that he wanted to kill him “and everybody in Israel,” the lawsuit alleges. A. B. also scrawled “I heart Hamas” on a whiteboard and held it up in a classroom, according to the suit.
‘Rumors started spreading’
Later on the day of the incident, June 11, 2024, Kiana Thompson, the school principal, told Danowitz’s mother that her son had snuck into the school and engaged in “sexually stimulated or suggestive dances or maneuvers,” tore down posters and shouted that he hated Muslims, per the lawsuit. (Danowitz denied those allegations.)
“Rumors started spreading that the boys had pulled the hijabs off the girls, that they had interrupted them praying, that they had committed sexual acts on the Muslim prayer rug on the floor—which of course is not a prayer rug, since it is a rug on the floor,” Marcus told JNS. “The boys started getting death threats.”
Allegations against the four boys spread on social media, where they received more threats.
The four families told school administrators about the death threats and asked them “to put this down and control this,” Marcus told JNS.
The school opted instead to “interrogate the boys” about the incident, according to Marcus.
Thompson and Rashida Stamps, a coach and dean of conduct, insisted that “the girls in the room were victims” and asked why the boys entered the room during “girls’ time” and why they harassed the girls in the room, per the suit, which names Thompson and Stamps as defendants.
When the boys denied the allegations, Thompson said that they were lying, Marcus told JNS.
The four boys and their parents attempted to meet with Thompson at the school on June 13, 2024, but the principal said she would only meet with J2 and his parents, who had a scheduled appointment that day, and asked security to escort the others off campus, according to the suit.
Hiester’s mother told the principal that it was important to meet that day due to the threats the boys were receiving. Per the suit, Thompson’s response was “laughing out loud, tilting her head to the side and stating, ‘Well, there’s multiple sides to that story.’”
A teacher from a different school in the district is also listed as a defendant in the lawsuit. That teacher mentioned the allegations against the boys during the public comment part of a school board meeting.
“She gave some descriptions of the boys without their names, but because the rumors were already spreading, people knew who it was,” Marcus told JNS. “It only made it worse and worse.”
The school suspended the three students for, it said, sneaking Danowitz onto campus through the school’s back door, according to Marcus.
Marcus told JNS that security camera footage at the school shows that Danowitz entered via the main entrance. Even if he hadn’t, his presence on campus doesn’t violate school policy, as it does not specify that former students are prohibited from coming to campus. “Non-Palumbo students came in and out of the school regularly,” she said. “So that was an unofficial practice.”
“They hadn’t even looked at it,” she said of video documentation. “The boy is shown on the security camera, but of course, it took them days to look at this.”
It took “many weeks” for the school to expunge the suspensions from the students’ academic records, per the lawsuit.
Marcus told JNS that the suspensions “fanned the flames” against the boys.
“The families had to move out of Philadelphia, so the boys could go to school in the suburb safely,” and “had to spend a tremendous amount of money,” she told JNS.
A district probe determined that the boys harassed the girls in the quiet room.
“There was an investigation. The report wasn’t even signed. They used eyewitnesses, who weren’t even in the room when it happened,” Marcus told JNS. “It was, from start to finish, a disaster. Everyone’s worst nightmare of what public schools have become.”
The Muslim girls said “they heard chanting in Hebrew, and one boy said he was a ‘proud Zionist’ and they were shocked to hear that in their space,” Marcus said. “Still, the school district found them guilty of harassment.”
The lawsuit alleges violations of the First Amendment and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as a “liberty interest to one’s reputation” claim, which Marcus said is a federal constitutional claim that resembles defamation.
The boys were also “deprived of their state law right to attend school in the district in which they live,” Marcus said.
The school needs to announce that the allegations against the boys are false, according to Marcus. “This is an unbelievable incident that has come close to destroying families,” she said. “The boys are good boys, who didn’t do anything wrong.”
“All of this happened because the school and the district are protecting a Muslim-only space in a public school,” she said.
