A Virginia school district closed its schools on Friday amid an angry backlash, including a possible "risk of harm to school officials," over an assignment that asked high school students to copy a Muslim creed in Arabic calligraphy.
Students in a world geography class at Riverheads High School in Staunton, Virginia, had been asked to try their hands at copying a passage known as the shehada, or declaration of faith in Islam. The work sheet distributed to students on Dec. 11 said: "This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy."
But some parents accused the teacher of trying to convert their children to Islam, inciting an angry outcry in the largely rural district nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. The shehada is recited as part of daily prayer, and translates to, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Speaking the shehada before witnesses is an important step in converting to Islam.
The complaints were further fueled by the teacher inviting female students to wear a head scarf, as many Muslim women do. The number of angry calls and emails to the district increased sharply as this week wore on, fueled by growing media coverage of the controversy.
"Some communications posed a risk of harm to school officials," and have been turned over to the Augusta County Sheriff's Department, the district said in a statement released Friday. "Others threatened significant protests on or near school property."
The district said it felt that "the risk of harm to school officials and the risk of further disruption in the educational environment" left the school board with little choice but to cancel classes and extracurricular activities, and begin winter break a day early. Parents were first notified Thursday night, in a statement online.
Speaking to CBS, Sheriff Randall Fisher described the messages sent to the school district in response to the assignment as "profane" and "hateful." The school board consulted with Fisher before deciding to shut down the schools.
The outcry in Augusta County comes during a steady drumbeat of anti-Muslim speech by politicians and a nationwide wave of hate crimes targeting Muslims, including physical assaults and acts of vandalism and arson at mosques and Muslim-owned businesses, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.
As part of those precautionary measures, the sheriff's office said it would increase the number of patrols near school facilities in response to the messages.
Eric W. Bond, the superintendent of the Augusta County School District; Max W. Lowe, the principal of Riverheads High School; and Cheryl LaPorte, identified by parents and the local news media as the teacher who assigned the calligraphy exercise, did not respond to requests for comment. Parents who know LaPorte say she is not Muslim.
The district said the class included similar hands-on exposure to other religions and cultures, not just Islam. And it said that despite the outcry, it would continue to educate students about the world's religious diversity as required by state education guidelines but that "a different, nonreligious sample of Arabic calligraphy will be used in the future."
In an email to parents on Friday, Bond wrote that "Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion." Students were not told what the writing meant, or asked to recite it, he added, and "the scarf used in the activity was not an actual Islamic religious hijab."
But Kimberly Herndon, a parent who has been an outspoken critic of the geography assignment, said on Facebook that the students "were instructed to denounce our Lord by copying this creed of Islam." She organized a public forum Tuesday at a local church, at which parents condemned the assignment and demanded that the teacher be fired.
"This evil has been cloaked in the form of multiculturalism," she wrote, adding in a separate post that the students had been asked to write words that were "an abomination to their faith."
"This creed is connected to jihad in that it is the chant that is shouted while beheading those of Christian faith," Herndon wrote.
Some parents have said that any lesson that included a comparable Christian creed would be prohibited.
In an interview on Friday, Katie Reich, president of the district's parent-teacher association, said the matter "has been blown completely out of proportion" by the people who are angered by the assignment.
"The teacher who gave the assignment probably made some poor choices in her decisions, but the real problem are the people who are threatening to riot at the schools and threatening the administration," she said.
Laurel Truxell, a student in the class, told an NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia, that she at first refused to try on the head scarf, but "the teacher pushed and pushed and pushed so I did it," she said. Her parents called the school to object after Laurel was told a picture of her wearing the head scarf would be submitted to the yearbook, she said.
"I just felt uncomfortable learning about it in a world geography class," she told the television network. "You shouldn't teach religion in school unless you're in a religious class."
Others on social media encouraged people to show support for LaPorte. "Enough with the negative and ignorant!" Rob Johnson of Roanoke, Virginia, wrote on Facebook. "Let's show some common sense and support!"