Saturday, April 11, 2015
St. Cloud Muslims will host a public forum Monday on recent protests at Technical High School, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The event will come a day before federal officials visit the St. Cloud school district to discuss allegations of discrimination and harassment of Somali-American students.
A U.S. Department of Education guest will attend the council forum, according to a news release from the council's Minnesota chapter. Representatives from the council, or CAIR, also will be present.
Jaylani Hussein is executive director of the Minnesota CAIR chapter. Hussein said he expects attorneys from the department's Office of Civil Rights to attend the forum and listen to concerns raised there.
"It's an opportunity for them to listen to the community," Hussein said.
The forum is open to the public, and Tech students and parents are encouraged to take part, according to the release.
It will be from 6-8 p.m. Monday at the Atwood Memorial Center at St. Cloud State University. It will be hosted by the university's Muslim Student Association. Hussein said he also expects participation from members of a recently organized task force of St. Cloud-area Somali-Americans.
Representatives from the Office of Civil Rights are set to meet Tuesday with St. Cloud school district officials and students. The office reached an agreement with the district in 2011 in response to previous allegations of bullying and harassment of Somali-American students.
Those tensions were publicly rekindled last month when a group of students, most of them Somali-American, walked out of Tech during a school day to protest what they described as a pattern of bullying and harassment. They said the last straw was a social media post with a picture of a Somali-American student and a caption implying she was part of the Islamic State terrorist organization.
A verbal disturbance two days later brought police to the school. The incidents caused school officials to temporarily restrict the movement of all students at Tech and Apollo high schools.
Since then, district officials have met to discuss the allegations with the newly formed local Somali-American task force. According to St. Cloud Superintendent Willie Jett, the task force has raised other concerns including the achievement gap for students of color, the district's student suspension rate, training students in cultural awareness and hiring more teachers and administrators of color.