1986 some religious Muslim female students and their parents wanted separate physical education classes for girls, so the school established such classes. State Champions Fordson won the 1975 State Volleyball Championship albeit it was not an MHSAA-sanctioned tournament. The MHSAA started sponsoring volleyball in 1976. Student life Student body When Fordson first opened, about all of the students were European American. For much of its history the students were immigrants of Greek, Italian, and Polish heritage, or other areas in Central and Southern areas of the continent. Many had parents working for the automobile industry. In 1986 the school had 1,755 students. The majority of non-Arab students, referred to as "Americans" or "Anglos" in the school parlance, were of Italian and Greek heritage, and were by then in their second and third generations. Arab Americans had been in the student body since the establishment of the school, with the original generations prior to the late 1960s seeking to fully assimilate into the dominant culture of the area. By the 1970s numbers of Arab Americans increased. Numbers of Students of Arab ancestry increased after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War and the 1978 South Lebanon conflict. By 1986 Arab Americans were almost 40% of the student body, with Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, and Yemeni-origin students represented, with the first group being the largest. Some of the students fled strife and were relatively uneducated before coming to Fordson. Unlike previous generations, some students chose to avoid assimilation. Some felt that they were not meant to stay in the United States permanently. By 1986 the school had established a prayer room for students and began accommodating requests from devout students, such as exempting them from some classes. In addition to Arab immigrants, there were students of recent non-Arab immigrant backgrounds, including Albanians, Ivorians, Pakistanis, and Romanians. Arab Americans made up over 90% of the student body, and as of 2012 Muslims made up about 97% of the students. In the 2000s, those of Lebanese Shia ancestry made up the largest group of Arab students. Among the Arab students were longtime residents as well as recent immigrants; as of 2002 the latter often ate lunch inside the student cafeteria. Longtime residents, who often ate lunch in off-campus restaurants, thought the recent immigrants, known as "boaters" meaning "fresh off the boat" in area Arab-American slang, had a lack of sophistication. In the words of Gary