Plans to establish Northern Nevada’s first charter school that will offer an Islamic curriculum are under way, with the hopes of opening in fall of 2010, members of the Reno Muslim community said.
The Northern Nevada Muslim Community finalized its purchase of a 12,000-square-foot building on Oddie Boulevard in mid-October, Northern Nevada Muslim Community president Mahmoud Hendi said. The group plans to renovate the building into Reno’s first charter school to offer courses on Arabic and Islamic studies, he said.
The fall 2010 date for enrollment is tentative, Hendi said. Renovation will begin only after the building has been paid for in full. At present, 60 percent of the building has been paid for, he said.
The site of the proposed school sits just behind the Northern Nevada Muslim Community Center on Oddie Boulevard, home to Reno’s only mosque. The center was established in 1999.
Open to the general public, the school will offer a full core curriculum to elementary school-aged students and will feature optional courses in Islamic studies, including Arabic language instruction and Quran studies, Hendi said.
“We have a responsibility to help our community prosper and attract new families,” Hendi said. “Parents want to instill good ethics in their children, but this often takes second seat to other matters. This school offers that opportunity.”
Hendi, a native of Jordan and longtime Reno resident, sees the opening of the school as a way of appealing to Muslim parents looking to raise their children in a more traditional Islamic environment. The lack of such educational institutions has led some families to leave the Reno area in search of better developed Muslim communities, he said.
“There have been several families in the past 10 years who have moved on to different communities in search of a better environment for their children,” Hendi said.
Sherif Elfass, vice president of the Northern Nevada Muslim Community, thinks about the environment his two daughters are growing up in.
“My daughter asks me, ‘Why are Muslim women oppressed, dad?’ And I think about what they learn on TV,” he said.
Elfass, a civil engineering professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said he would like his daughters to attend a school where they can learn about the real values of Islam. He said he feels his children and other children in the community are misguided by what they hear on television about Islam.
“As a Muslim, I would like to instill Muslim values in my children, but they don’t receive information from me like they would from a formal teacher,” Elfass said.
A formal environment where children are instructed by professionals is essential to learning the core values of Islam, he said.
The Northern Nevada Muslim Community has provided Islamic studies instruction during weekends at Reno’s mosque for years, and the idea of a full-time school offering Islamic studies has been discussed by the community board numerous times, Elfass said
“There are many things the community would like to do but can’t, due to limited resources,” he said.
When the building next to mosque went on the market in June, the Northern Nevada Muslim Community knew this was a good opportunity to expand, he said.
Kowsar Khan, 19, president of the Muslim Student Association at the University of Nevada, Reno, has a 9-year-old brother and said there is a need for such a school in the area.
Khan, a native of Bangladesh, said that parents desire to raise their children with an understanding of Islam.
“As a Muslim parent, the main goal is to get your children to read the Quran, and most parents want to do that,” he said.
