Applying for an Islamic Charter School in Minnesota

In 2023 we applied to start an Islamic charter school in Minnesota to meet the high demand for Islamic education amongst the large population of low socio-economic status families in the Minnesota Muslim community, especially those with a refugee background from East Africa. This demand had been established by surveying and community seminars held by the Islamic Association of North America, who reached out to Abraham Education in February of 2023 for assistance in strategizing to meet this demand in the community. ​

​In August of 2023 Abraham Education reached out to charter school authorizers in the Twin Cities. Novation Education Opportunities (NEO) responded to our query expressing interest in having us apply to start a charter school. 

This culminated in us sending NEO a letter of intent to apply for a school, following their application procedures, in early December of 2023. In this letter of intent to apply we made it explicit that the school would be a religious school that would teach classical Sunni Islamic creed.  In section 3 of the letter of intent where NEO's template prompts to provide a description of the school the letter of intent reads:
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Abraham Knowledge Academy will be the first Islamic Charter School in Minnesota, committed to enhancing pupil learning and student achievement through a unique, holistic educational approach. Our program integrates a knowledge-based curriculum adapted from ED Hirsch's Core Knowledge framework1, proven to improve learning outcomes2, with the teachings and values of Islam. This unique and innovative approach responds to a deep need in the Twin Cities’ diverse Muslim community, but also will be valuable to and inclusive of non-Muslim students desirous of a knowledge-based, religiously-infused learning environment.  Our curriculum will include specialized classes in Islamic creed based on traditional Sunni doctrine, Arabic Language, the science of Qur'an recitation (tajweed), and traditional Sunni Qur’anic exegesis, alongside comprehensive Islamic history courses.

The entire letter of intent is available here.
Following that the director of NEW, Wendy Swanson-Choi, responded with the following:

Hello Michael,
Thank you very much again for your letter of intent to apply.
We are very excited by your plan to respect, integrate, and affirm all aspects of student identity. 
The challenge is that charter schools are public schools and must be secular as such. 
Charter schools cannot promote a religion. That said, there are many things a charter school can do to respect, integrate and affirm all aspects of each student's identity. I think you can revise the plan as such. Would you still like to proceed with developing a charter school given that it must be secular because it is a public school and therefore, cannot promote a religion?
Please let us know.
Thank you,
Wendy

From there, we responded re-directing Wendy to the "legal justification" part of our letter of intent to apply and further providing the justification for not enforcing Oklahoma's similar non-sectarian clause of their charter school law. Wendy replied saying she found this interesting and that she would in turn reach out to the Minnesota Department of Education for guidance. She replied back later saying that the department of education had replied to here saying that new Supreme Court rulings and the acceptance of catholic charter school in Oklahoma had not had any bearing on Minnesota state law. The communication to her from Paula Higgins, the director of the charter school center of the Minnesota Department of Education, was forwarded to me in that communication. A PDF file of that communication can be downloaded below:

re_oklahoma_decision_and_impact_on_new_charter_school_affidavit_approval.pdf
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Now restricted from applying for a charter school that would be able to teach religion consist with our faith and that of the community demand that we had ascertained to exist, but still having strong interest from NEO for us to apply to start a charter school, we pivoted to apply to start a school that would focus on general religious literacy as a theme. We submitted a full application to NEO by their deadline in January and in the application we reserved the right to change the school to a faith-based Islamic school if Minnesota law changed or a court of relevant jurisdiction ruled that charter schools were entitled to be religious (see footnote 68 of the full application). 

That full application can be seen at this link and below:

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