(RNN) – Muslim children who were asked to leave a public pool in Delaware have now been given an apology by the city’s mayor.
Tahsiyn Ismaa’eel told The News Journal of Wilmington, DE, that the schoolchildren in her summer program, Darul-Amaanah Academy, were asked to leave by a pool manager because they were swimming in cotton material.
Ismaa’eel said she’d been bringing children to the city pool for four years, and had never been confronted about such an issue.
“There’s nothing posted that says you can’t swim in cotton,” she told the paper. “At the same time, there are other kids with cotton on. I asked, ‘Why are my kids being treated differently?’”
She added a police officer stationed at the pool pressed her on when her group would be leaving, even though another group had been there longer.
“We were approached first about cotton, and then it became, ‘Oh, the pool is overcapacity so you need to leave,’” she told the News Journal. “I felt very unwanted.”
The mayor of Wilmington, Mike Purzycki, released a statement in which he said: “I apologize to the children who were directed to leave a city pool because of the religious-required clothing they were wearing.”
The statement also said, “We should be held accountable for what happened and how poorly we assessed this incident.”
The cotton ban will remain in place going forward. An aide to the mayor, John Rago, outlined why the city is enforcing it.
“Among the safety considerations is the fact that cotton becomes heavy when wet and weighs swimmers down,” he said. “Cotton also strains the pool filtration system more than proper swimwear.”
In a video The News Journal posted to Facebook, Ismaa’eel said children had long swam at the pool in whatever they had, including cotton shorts and t-shirts.
“My concern was the fact that there are children in the poorest areas of this city who may not have a swimsuit that is not cotton,” she said. “Lot of kids come in shorts and tops, it’s what they’ve got, and they’ve been swimming that way for years.”
She added that she at least wanted the policy to be clearly communicated and not "enforced arbitrarily.”
While products such as the “burkini” do exist, observant Muslims, particularly girls who wear the hijab, often don't have readily available swimwear alternatives that satisfy religious clothing requirements.
The city’s parks director, Kevin Kelley, told The News Journal that he could “provide some more time for the children (to) obtain the proper clothing, but they need to wear something other than cotton into the pool.”
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