“The parents have got to wake up to the fact,” says constitutional activist Donna Hearne, “that their child is being indoctrinated in a way that is very destructive not only to what they probably believe in but also to the future of America.”

Hearne, who heads the Missouri-based Constitutional Coalition, was reacting to a controversial high school assignment in Massachusetts, where Newtown High students pretended to be Muslims making their pilgrimage to Islam’s holy city of Mecca.

A second classroom assignment, Fox News reported, tells students to pretend to be a Muslim in the “Islamic city” of Jerusalem.

The Fox News story quotes a Judicial Watch investigator who said Newtown parents have been fighting the left-wing school district for years over the slanted pro-Islam school materials.

“When you hear so much caterwauling from the Left about religion being mixed in the school, it’s a little troubling when kids are being asked to go on an imaginary Hajj,” the investigator, Bill Marshall, told Fox News for its online story.

The ongoing fight between parents and left-wing school administrators is nothing new.

OneNewsNow reported in April how San Diego public schools vowed to address Islamaphobia” by introducing Muslim holidays to the school calendar among other feel-good efforts.

In that April story and others, this news website has linked to a 2015 investigation by fact-checker Snopes, which was surprised to read the pro-Islam materials in a seventh grade geography textbook. Students are taught about the “glory days” of Islam while Christianity is about “harming their neighbors and attempting to quash science,” Snopes reported at the time.

One important detail about an imagined trip to Mecca, Hearne tells OneNewsNow, is that only Muslims are permitted in Mecca.

So it would be likely, she adds, that these same students would be considered Muslim converts if they named the five pillars of Islam and recited the “shahada” – the Muslim profession of faith.