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School districts in religious diverse districts should do their best to recognize all major religious holidays or none at all. Another idea is to give students 2 religious holidays and allow parents to choose which holidays their child will have off.
Quote:
This is what the Fairfax County School Board has been wrestling with in a drawn-out, contorted debate about whether to expand the holiday calendar to add Jewish and Muslim holidays, something school districts across the nation already have done.
Muslims represent 2.7% of VA (the state in question). 1.1% of the US.
From the article/editorial, tell us the religious significance of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Find me the school that is closed for "Christmas Day". Just one - but one that's not closed for a week or more for "Christmas break" or now call it "holiday break". Heck, find me the district open on Kwanzaa.
Louisiana is closed for Mardi Gras, and the author names religious and cultural importance. Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday have little religious significance, it is the cultural "last chance to indulge" before the 40 days of Lent begin on Ash Wednesday - which IS the religious component of that week.
School districts in religious diverse districts should do their best to recognize all major religious holidays or none at all. Another idea is to give students 2 religious holidays and allow parents to choose which holidays their child will have off.
The majority of them are. It's not unreasonable to give them a day off if most students would be absent.
In some areas opening day of hunting season is a holiday. Or it should be. That's not religious, but it's expected. Several years ago I took my daughter out of school to go deer hunting. Most of her classmates also did. I've heard some schools actually plan for that and take the day off.
Or another example is that next week I'm getting the first Covid shot at the school. I'm a substitute teacher. Not all teachers are getting the shot but because enough are, they're closing for the afternoon....should they be required to work? Or is it reasonable to give them the day off?
Tailoring holiday observances and even curriculums to the prevailing culture of a society is unique to neither the westerner nor the Christian. Now I'm open to a little more flexibility in these matters but a lack of such is hardly an example of uncommon wickedness.
For some clarity: the traditional reason school districts determined days off in the school calendar was based on when there likely was going to be a large percentage of the student body that was going to be absent. The original reason there was a Spring Break was not so people could go to the beach, it was during the sowing. Between mid-May and early-September was when the bulk of agricultural activity took place and in city areas the heat before air conditioning made sitting in a classroom untenable in both June and August. Christmas and Thanksgiving traditionally had been missed because the religious/cultural importance those two holidays for the bulk of most communities meant that parents would not send their children to school on those days. Once agriculture no longer significantly needed to drive school calendars and paid time off for national holidays became a thing for our now industrial based society, school holidays became more uniform and vacation driven. Spring Break transferred from being tied to the local sowing window to being associated with Easter, which had often but not always overlapped the sowing season.
Right now Christmas is the only religious holiday specifically missed, and it currently has a rather significant secular meaning also. There are some school systems that have all or part of Good Friday off, it used to be because some many missed that day to go to church but let’s be honest here, nowadays that is more to start Spring Break early than to go to church. The thing is we are no longer a homogeneous society, as we no longer insist on assimilation, and there are a very large number of various religions. All schools are supposed to excuse absences for bonafide religious purposes (I had a family of Wiccans that missed on Halloween, what seemed like it was on Groundhog Day but was something else, and May 1 every year).
The quandary for the schools is if there is a significant number that will miss a day. The issue is that in most states if over a certain percentage miss on a given day the entire school district has to make up that day with no additional funding - in other words, they lose money. Additionally, individual schools can be shut down if over a certain percentage misses, it triggers an automatic 3-day school shut down because the assumption is so many are missing because a communicable disease is going through the school. So, if the school has a population of a certain religion in excess of 10% of their student body they need to weigh whether it’s worth it financially to hold school on days that conflict with religious obligations. I will tell you Ramadan is a huge issue in Muslim heavy schools, not just in terms of absences but the restrictions interfere with the kids’ ability to learn.
For a huge and truly diverse school system like Fairfax County, there are no easy answers. With over 200 schools and clustered communities, they have schools that should be off for certain Muslim holidays and there are there are enough Western African immigrants in another school that different holiday ought to be established but then in most of their schools it does not matter.
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School districts in religious diverse districts should do their best to recognize all major religious holidays or none at all. Another idea is to give students 2 religious holidays and allow parents to choose which holidays their child will have off.
Muslims represent 2.7% of VA (the state in question). 1.1% of the US.
From the article/editorial, tell us the religious significance of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Find me the school that is closed for "Christmas Day". Just one - but one that's not closed for a week or more for "Christmas break" or now call it "holiday break". Heck, find me the district open on Kwanzaa.
Louisiana is closed for Mardi Gras, and the author names religious and cultural importance. Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday have little religious significance, it is the cultural "last chance to indulge" before the 40 days of Lent begin on Ash Wednesday - which IS the religious component of that week.
School districts should evaluate imho. The discussion about Muslims is regarding a particular county in Northern VA. In the article, Jews in the area are discussed as well due to an increase in their population.
When will the left stop polarizing on these secondary and tertiary level causes, ones that really can't be solved by any government, and focus on things that are actually important?
Why the heightened sensitivity? Again, there's more important things to worry about then making EVERYBODY happy!
When you have 25% of your students out for a religious holiday, it seems like making that a school holiday is prudent. This has been a debate in my local school district because they have large numbers out for Jewish holidays. They should absolutely give those days off. The secular private schools in the area do.
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