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This widely circulated item claiming that a public high school in the Hilliard City School District (headquartered in Columbus, Ohio) hosts a special room for Muslims to pray in originated with events that took place in that area back in 2007, when Muslim students at some of the district's high schools were allowed to leave their classrooms for 5 to 10 minutes each day and gather in a separate room for prayer during the holy month of Ramadan: As the principal of one of those schools explained, accommodating the request that Muslim students be allowed to leave their classrooms briefly once during the day for prayer was deemed to be less disruptive to the educational process than requiring those students to seek excused absences every day throughout the month in order to adhere to their faiths: However, it is not true that any of the Hilliard City high schools has created a special room for Muslims to pray in. When Muslim students needed a place of privacy where they could briefly engage in prayer outside the classroom during Ramadan, each day they made temporary use of a space that was promptly returned to its original function afterwards: As stated on the Infrequently Answered Questions section of the Hilliard City School District's web site, none of the Hilliard City Schools encompasses a room regularly or permanently dedicated to such a purpose: Additionally, Stacie Raterman, Community Relations Coordinator for Hilliard City Schools, told us that Hilliard City Schools has three high schools. There are no prayer rooms in any of the buildings. Many iterations of this rumor have been spread with the inclusion of additional text taken from an article about President Obama's supposedly having announced a nationwide Muslim outreach program for children from grades K-12. That article is also false, nothing more than a leg pull originally published by a fake news site in September 2013.
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