Islamic School of Sex? Error chagrins feds

The Islamic School of Seattle is a small, private institution for pre-kindergarten to middle-school children. It does not have sex education in its curriculum.

So you might understand why school officials were a little surprised — shocked, actually — to find the school listed on a U.S. Department of Education Web site as the Islamic School of Sex.

"At first I thought it was one of those Arab/Muslim-hating sites just having a little fun with us," said Jeff Siddiqui, chairman of the school. "But the Department of Education? That couldn't be. I went to their Web site and backtracked. And son of a gun. I couldn't stop laughing. I couldn't believe my eyes."

"Now we know why we've had such low admission," Siddiqui added, jokingly. "People want to send their kids to an Islamic school, but not an Islamic School of Sex."

The listing is included in a link from the Education Department Web site at which users can search for public and private schools, colleges and libraries across the country. Department officials contacted Wednesday corrected the error immediately, saying it likely was caused by a computer program truncating the name.

"It's embarrassing, obviously; this was totally unintentional," said Mike Bowler, a department spokesman. "I can assure you staff would never do something like that — not even as a joke. The agency takes its role very seriously."

Located in the Central Area, the Islamic School of Seattle is a coed institution with an Islamic affiliation and about 60 students enrolled this year. It is unclear how long the Department of Education misnamed it on its Web site before correcting the error.

Siddiqui said that "as much as I'm inclined to take a light-hearted view of this," he's not convinced the error was inadvertent. Mistyped, the Islamic School of Seattle might appear as the "Islamic School of Sexttle," or some variation — but not just "Sex," he said.

"You can't take a word like Seattle and reduce it down to sex," he said. "Someone was probably thinking that something like sex is so opposite to those stodgy Muslims, let's throw them off."

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com