Suffer the Little Muslims

"When he told me what happened, I was furious. And he was so upset," Ariana says. She wrote a letter to Amir's teacher, but never spoke to her or the principal about it. "Now I wish I would have," she says.

Tim Sullivan, the principal of Skyline Elementary School, says that had the problem come to his attention he would have investigated it "and made sure it didn't happen again."

James Sanders

Galileo was the site of one discrimination case involving a teacher.

Elmira Dianati is the only parent in the Bay Area to take a school discrimination complaint to the federal level.

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• Brian Kelly
• Fremont
• Racial Issues
• Elementary Education

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"It's not that I doubt what this family is saying," he says. "It's just that the problem never came to me."

Amir is now in middle school in Daly City. Ariana says he has become more comfortable with both himself and his culture, especially after a family reunion in Detroit last year. But Ariana is still angry about her son's fifth-grade teacher. "I understand if you have your own opinions and your own politics," she says. "But I don't understand how you can be a teacher and take your stuff out on little children."