Liz Collin, the courageous and intrepid senior producer and investigative reporter at Alpha News in Minneapolis, just dropped a bit of a gobsmacker on X.
The lunatics and fanatics up there just do not quit, and it absolutely blows my mind.
🚨NEW: Osseo Schools has confirmed to @AlphaNews that its remodel project at Park Center Senior High includes a prayer room and that foot-washing stations are being added to Osseo Senior High School.
The district, located in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, says the… pic.twitter.com/3IAwbMFNCl
— Liz Collin (@lizcollin) April 20, 2026
…The district, located in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, says the foot-washing plans “were included in updated plans after hearing from user groups on student needs.”
“This is undoubtedly for Muslim students only. I cannot understand how this can be happening in this era of no religion in schools,” the tipster said.
Now, this is so completely appalling to me on so many fronts. First and foremost, because I am one of those curmudgeons who want public schools to be neutral ground, period, for everyone.
Children are there, in those classrooms, for learning. That’s it. And there is so little of that going on as it is.
I don’t want anyone’s prayers or prayer rugs or rainbow flags or whatever doesn’t have to do with the Palmer method examples ringing the room or a pull-down map of the world – whatever the educational aids might be on the wall or clipped to a blackboard.
No one feels left out, and no one feels special if everyone is treated exactly the same in the building – like students.
But what really hacks me off is thinking of the hundreds of millions that have been spent on lawsuits over the most frivolous violations of someone else’s religious sensitivities (or lack thereof), and now a public high school is going to pander openly to a religion. Constructing facilities specifically to cater to one religion, when not long ago a student organized simply standing around a flag pole for prayers before school, was enough to bring down the shrieking wrath of the mighty ACLU.
In 2007, the ACLU won an injunction against the Wilson County School system in Tennessee, for ‘promoting religion’ for what sounds like pretty amped up religiosity in a public school.
It’s pretty clear-cut that none of that is supposed to happen, and it did.
…The plaintiffs alleged that the Wilson County school system promoted a range of religious activities, including the “Praying Parents,” “Prayer at the Flag Pole,” the National Day of Prayer event and teacher-led classroom prayers. “The Praying Parents” were identified on the school website as a group of parents who meet monthly “to pray for our school, faculty, staff, and children.” The group, which met in the school cafeteria at the start of the school day, was endorsed in the school’s monthly newsletter; their flyers were distributed to students; and their members would enter the classroom to inform students that “the Praying Parents” prayed for them. In addition, plaintiffs had evidence of teacher-led prayer and religious singing in the classroom.
…In December 2007, the federal court granted our request for injunctive relief on the majority of ACLU-TN’s claims, finding that the defendants had engaged in a clear pattern and practice of promoting and endorsing religion.
From that point, it went into overdrive, trying to ban teachers wearing crucifixes as triggering mechanisms, Christmas greetings, and Halloween parades because God forbid anyone simply have a good time.
The pride flags and totally deviant stuff, though?
WAAH!
Rainbow flags, pride flags, and other symbols celebrating LGBTQ pride are a protected form of free speech in school settings. This open letter, drafted in partnership with the Gilbert Baker Foundation, explains this fundamental right to principals, administrators, and other school faculty.
Common sense eventually ruled the day, but good grief. What a battle to even get that far, because religion was involved, the third rail, and people lost their minds.
…In the early years of See You at the Pole, some schools apparently felt that allowing their students to gather for prayer on school property might violate the Establishment Clause.1 However, a broad consensus quickly developed within the legal and educational communities that See You at the Pole posed no constitutional problem. Two documents were instrumental in forging this consensus. First, Religion in the Public Schools: A Joint Statement of Current Law was issued. This document explicitly declared that “[s]tudent participation in before- or after-school events, such as ‘See You at the Pole,’ is permissible. School officials, acting in an official capacity, may neither discourage nor encourage participation in such an event” (Religion in the Public Schools: A Joint Statement of Current Law, September 13, 2001).
So… fast-forward almost twenty years, and I am on pins and needles waiting to hear what those guardians of equal treatment for all have to say about, not just singing and a note going home about a meeting in the cafeteria, but facilities built exclusively to serve a religion.
And it’s that religion. A third rail again.
As our dear colleague here and long-time Minnesota native Mitch Berg noted, good luck to the Christian or Jew kiddo who wanted a special carve-out in the school refurbishment.
So, on the one hand Christians *can* pray privately – Muslim prayer DOES involve a public display.
On the other hand, you all know bloody well that if any Christian students DID seek public accommodation the @ACLU and @ACLUMN would whiz on it until it floated away.
— Mitch “The Wałęsa Project” Berg 🇺🇸🇳🇴🇪🇪🇦🇷 (@mitchpberg) April 20, 2026
The school administration would still be laughing. Probably after they suspended whoever asked because of some sort of hate crime.
These Minnesota towns, especially surrounding Minneapolis, appear to have an even more critical assimilation problem than the big city itself. There is none.
Daniel Greenfield wrote a piece for his blog about a smallish suburb that’s been overwhelmed by the Somali influx and what has happened to its once-pretty-stellar schools.
“Faribault has become our city,” a Somali interviewed by the Minnesota Post bragged.
Faribault, Minnesota, is a small city about an hour’s drive from Minneapolis. On paper it should have the smaller crime rate of the alphabetically similar Farmington which is nearly the same size and only a half hour away. Instead, Faribault has more than twice as much violent crime, aggravated assaults, burglaries and car thefts, 30% more rapes, and 8 times as many robberies. Farmington has no arsons, but Faribault has the most arsons of any city outside major strongholds like Minneapolis, St. Paul or Duluth.
But Faribault has something Farmington doesn’t: diversity. Especially from its Somalis.
The city of over 20,000 used to be much less diverse. In 1990, it was even 98% white. Or as the Minnesota Post described it, with a shudder, “an almost entirely homogeneous white community, not much different from many towns across Minnesota.” But Faribault was an hour away from Minneapolis at a time when it was being overtaken by Somali mass migration, and it had a meat processing plant, now partly shut down, which is always a draw for illegal aliens and migrants.
…Minority enrollment in the city’s schools was up 243% in twenty years. By 2018, minority students made up a majority of the school system. Today, 60% of the school district is minority and only 36% white. A population of older white homeowners is subsidizing education and services for Somali and South American migrant meatpacking plant workers with their property taxes.
The Faribault School Board has recently been debating teaching science, health and social studies in Somali. As of 2022, there were over 900 Faribault students who didn’t speak English.
The Somali education program was proposed after complaints from Somalis and other migrants that their “home languages were being lost as students became more English-dominant” and “parents and children no longer shared a common language, weakening communication and cultural connections within families.” Rather than expecting their parents to learn English, Faribault schools are expected to prevent their children from learning English, instead teaching them in Somali.
Faribault might as well teach the students in Somali because state test proficiency scores showed that math proficiency was at 13.7%, science was at 16.1% and reading was at 29.8%. Test scores, graduation rates, attendance and every possible metric are below state standards.
Osseo, the town proper, is northwest of Minneapolis. Really tiny, it has a population of 2,526 as of 2024. But the Osseo Area School District is the fifth-largest in the state and has over 20,000 students, with what I guess is a significant enough Somali presence that the district has a Somali Facebook page and an East African student club.
And for now, they’re on track to get some more bennies that are currently unavailable to your average American.
Are there enough parents willing to speak up? I’m going to have to watch for more of Liz’s reports or hope David or Mitch hears something.
The key will be who uses it. It’s all completely legal under current law if everyone has access to all of the facilities. If these are built and other students do not utilize them equally as much as Muslim students, it becomes a de facto Muslim prayer room by default.
If, say, Christian kids allow themselves to be intimidated from using any of it, or others are subtly blocked from entering, I hope everyone uses those phones they’re so fond of to document every rebuff.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
This is really something.
None of it belongs in an American public school.
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