The 2025 school year — now upon us — will bring challenges, triumphs and anxieties for 50 million students as they return to American public schools. But add to the overall picture the challenge that will come from a variety of lunacies unique to American culture.

Will the kids be afraid to look at the windows that punctuate their auditoriums for fear that a nearby shooter, for no reason anyone can understand, will be raining down bullets? Are the books in their libraries — especially ones dealing with transsexuals or curse words or make too many references to sexuality — really so dirty that they need to be banned? Should their cherished mobile phones, the link to their cyberworld, be banned from school?

But now politics is also knocking at the schoolhouse door. Take the case of 14-year-old Danielle Khalaf from the Detroit suburb of Clinton, Michigan, population 100,000, reasonably affluent and racially and ethnically diverse. A nice place to live, by all accounts. But Danielle is still having nightmares from last January as she finds herself in federal court because of what occurred in her classroom.

Danielle is a ninth grader of Palestinian descent. She’s a U.S. citizen but has watched with horror — along with the rest of the world — as 60,000 Palestinians have died after the terrorist group, Hamas, slipped into Israeli territory on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 and kidnapping 251. The counter attack by Israel, still going on, has been horrific. On Jan. 6, Danielle declined to join her classmates for the morning Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.

“Quietly and without disturbing her class, [she] remained seated,” a lawsuit on her behalf says. “She sat quietly while her classmates recited the Pledge.”

According to the lawsuit, her teacher, Carissa Soranno, admonished Danielle in front of the class, reporting her to school administrators.

“She was being disrespectful and should be ashamed of herself,” the teacher........

© The Leader