Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
During the summer, Ismaa’eel runs an Arabic enrichment program for students, and she takes them to the pool.
They regularly cool off on hot days, splashing around. They also regularly experience anti-Islamic harassment, Ismaa’eel said in an interview with The Washington Post.
It started the first day Ismaa’eel and about 15 children went to the pool in late June. A staff member told her that her children couldn’t wear “that cotton” to the pool, she said.
But “that cotton” included clothes required by their Islamic faith: hijabs for the girls, but also modest dress that typically covered their shoulders and most of their legs — even in the pool.
Pool officials spoke of the dangerous weight of wet cotton and said the girls’ religiously required clothing could put a strain on the pool’s filtration system. They cited a vaguely worded, unposted policy.
Ismaa’eel cited the Koran, explaining that the children were required to dress modestly. That’s why many of the little girls in her group wore hijabs and T-shirts and shorts that come down to their knees.
Over the years, Ismaa’eel has never seen anyone wearing cotton asked to leave, she said.
The conflict reached a climax last week when a pool official tapped several of Ismaa’eel’s hijab-wearing campers on the shoulder and told them they had to leave.
Public outcry ensued as word spread.
“All Americans are entitled to reasonable religious accommodations while using public facilities,” said Zainab Chaudry, spokeswoman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “And it is unlawful to discriminate against members of any group because of their religious attire.”
On Saturday, Mayor Mike Purzycki reaffirmed “the city’s long-standing policy that all people are welcome at city pools.”
“We should be held accountable for what happened and how poorly we assessed this incident,” Purzycki said in a statement. “I apologize to the children who were directed to leave a city pool because of the religious-required clothing they were wearing. We also referred to vaguely-worded pool policies to assess and then justify our poor judgment, and that was also wrong.”
Purzycki said he planned to meet soon with the camp director to address her concerns and apologize in person.
Ismaa’eel said she was happy with the mayor’s apology — at least until she and her kids trekked to the pool on Monday. The woman who kicked them out last week was still there.
She didn’t stick around for another “I’m sorry.”
Instead she turned the children around, marched back to the school and started the van.
A short time later, she went live on Facebook, shooting an image of a little girl in tights, a life jacket and a hijab, wading into a pool.
“When they shut down one pool on you,” Ismaa’eel wrote, “go have fun in another.”
