Plan for Muslim School Imperiled

Amid accusations of racism--and charges that they buckled under political pressure--Orange County planning officials Wednesday shelved a Muslim group’s proposal to build a small grade school in Rancho Santa Margarita, a move that could jeopardize the project.

The Planning Commission voted 2 to 1 to delay a decision on the New Horizon school until January. But Rancho Santa Margarita’s residents voted earlier this month to incorporate as Orange County’s 33rd city. That means jurisdiction over the school proposal will switch from the county to the city on Jan. 1--which means Wednesday’s vote places the decision in the lap of the city.

Several of the people elected to Rancho Santa Margarita’s first city council have already joined in the protests against the proposal. So leaders of Southern California’s Muslim community say Wednesday’s vote effectively killed their plans.

“The county has decided to wipe their hands clean of this,” said Salam Al-Maryati, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. “I think they have demonstrated a lack of moral backbone in standing up for what is right and what is fair.”

In recent months, the school debate has morphed from a humdrum civic dispute over traffic into a bitter tussle over ethnicity and race. In just a decade, Orange County’s Muslim community has grown from 50,000 to an estimated 200,000, and its leaders see the school vote as a measuring stick for their ability to assimilate into the region’s largely white suburbs.

It is a test they believe the county is failing.

“It is a form of exclusion, and they are using technicalities as an excuse,” Al-Maryati said. “It’s weak and it’s disingenuous.”

Three of five incoming City Council members wrote to county officials, urging them to table the decision until the city could take over. But one of them, Neil Blais, said ethnicity has never been a factor in the debate.

It has always been about traffic, he said, and now that residents have voted overwhelmingly to become a city, it’s about “local control” too, he said.

“The City Council is the place for this kind of decision,” he said. “We have expressed concerns about the traffic. But we would have to study the issue and judge it on its merits.”

The New Horizon school would be the second Muslim grade school in the county. Tentatively scheduled to open in September, it would have 200 students at first. A second batch of 200 youngsters would arrive in 2005, when the Islamic Center hopes to open a middle school. The site is at Camino Altozano and Avenida de las Banderas.

Some county officials downplayed Wednesday’s action. If the Planning Commission moved forward Wednesday, the losing side would certainly have appealed to the Board of Supervisors. Appeals generally take 45 days, which would mean the school debate would have fallen into the lap of the city anyway after Jan. 1.

“If it came to the Board of Supervisors, fine, I was ready to deal with it,” said Supervisor Tom Wilson. “But when you are so close to cityhood . . . I think it’s probably apropos for them to deal with it. So while it is an issue that started in the county watch, I think that now it’s probably just as well that it turned out the way it turned out.”