Four Montgomery County Public Schools teachers who were placed on administrative leave last year and were under investigation for publicly expressing pro-Palestinian views–which some members of the county’s Jewish and Israeli communities considered antisemitic–have returned to teaching but at different schools, according to MCPS officials.
In a Friday response to MoCo360’s Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) request, the district identified the schools where the four teachers are now working, but provided no information about the status of investigations into their actions, citing MCPS personnel policy.
According to the district, here are the new assignments for the four teachers:
- Hajur El-Haggan, who taught math at Argyle Middle School in Silver Spring, is teaching at Greencastle Elementary School in Silver Spring;
- Sabrina Khan-Williams, who was a team leader and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) teacher at Tilden Middle School in Rockville, is currently employed at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown;
- Anike Robinson, who was an art and English teacher at Westland Middle School in Bethesda, is on staff at Hallie Wells Middle School in Clarksburg; and
- Angela Wolf, the department head of English Language Development at Takoma Park Middle School, now works at Seneca Valley High School in Germantown.
El-Haggan, Wolf and Khan-Williams did not immediately respond to MoCo360’s email request for comment Friday afternoon.
Robinson declined to comment and referred questions to her lawyers at the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington, D.C.-based national non-profit civil rights and advocacy organization representing Muslim American liberties. El-Haggan, Robinson and Wolf are being represented by CAIR in a lawsuit against the Board of Education and MCPS that challenges the administrative leave and investigation of the three teachers.
“As you know we are suing the county and we hope people will respect our privacy,” Robinson wrote in an email.
MCPS has previously said that it is prohibited from speaking about specific personnel decisions and investigations. In the district’s Friday response to MoCo360’s MPIA request, MCPS spokesman Chris Cram wrote that MCPS is unable to provide answers to MoCo360’s questions regarding why the teachers were reinstated, why they were moved to different schools and the status of the investigations into their conduct.
In November, Khan-Williams was placed on administrative leave after her social media posts went viral for alleged antisemitic content in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that led to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
In December, Robinson and Wolf were placed on administrative leave for social media posts that the district, as well as some in the Jewish and Israeli communities, called antisemitic. That same month, CAIR and El-Haggan filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for discrimination after she was placed on administrative leave allegedly for including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in her email signature.
“From the river to the sea” is a phrase that is often used by pro-Palestinian activists who say that it calls for peace and the right to free movement across the Palestinian territories. Some Jews and Israelis view the phrase as a call for the elimination and destruction of the Jewish state, according to the American Jewish Committee.
The complaint said that other MCPS employees had included political and social viewpoints in email signatures (not pertaining to the Israel-Hamas war), but El-Haggan was the only known employee to be disciplined.
The CAIR lawsuit, filed in February against MCPS and the school board, names nine other district leaders and was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland. Khan-Williams is not included in the lawsuit.
CAIR attorneys representing the three teachers hoped the lawsuit would influence the district to reinstate the educators to their positions and issue them public apologies, CAIR attorney Rawda Fawaz said in February.
“They’ve acted to suppress viewpoints critical of Israel and the daily massacres that we’re all watching unfold in abject horror,” Fawaz told MoCo360 at the time. “This is a textbook violation of the First Amendment.”
Fawaz declined to comment on MoCo360’s inquiries regarding the date when the teachers were reinstated and on the reinstatement of the three teachers CAIR is representing. On Friday, Fawaz wrote in an email that “litigation is ongoing.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington has called for the district to be transparent about the investigations into the teachers’ conduct.
“While we understand that MCPS is restricted legally with respect to the information it can share about personnel matters, we urge district officials to share any information it can within those constraints to maintain trust with and accountability to Jewish families who have been on the receiving end of antisemitic attacks. Whereas transparency is critical to maintaining trust and safety, complete silence erodes that trust,” the council said in a March statement. “Communication is an indispensable tool in our collective efforts to fight antisemitism. We encourage MCPS to continue to abide by that principle to the maximum extent possible.”
