Great moments in democracy: Maryland school board removes religious holiday names from calendar

Last updated on: September 30, 2016 at 3:42 pm by Deacon Greg Kandra

Great moments in democracy: Maryland school board removes religious holiday names from calendar 2016-09-30T15:42:42-04:00 Deacon Greg Kandra

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As someone who grew up in Montgomery County, I can only ask: what the—?

Details:

Christmas and Easter have been stricken from next year’s school calendar in Montgomery County. So have Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Montgomery’s Board of Education voted 7 to 1 Tuesday to eliminate references to all religious holidays on the published calendar for 2015-2016, a decision that followed a request from Muslim community leaders to give equal billing to the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha.

In practical terms, Montgomery schools will still be closed for the Christian and Jewish holidays, as in previous years, and students will still get the same days off, as planned.

Board members said Tuesday that the new calendar will reflect days the state requires the system to be closed and that it will close on other days that have shown a high level of student and staff absenteeism. Though those days happen to coincide with major Christian and Jewish holidays, board members made clear that the days off are not meant to observe those religious holidays, which they say is not legally permitted.

The main and most noticeable difference will be that the published calendar will not mention any religious holidays by name.

Read more.

A did a little googling and found this website, which indicates that 4% of the population in Montgomery County is Muslim.

Meantime, some reaction:

Montgomery County Public Schools will remove religious labels from school holidays, but members of the Islamic community say the adjustments to the school calendar do nothing to gain parity and a day off for the Muslim holiday of Eid.

The school board approved the school calendar for the 2015-2016 school year Tuesday. The calendar will no longer reference specific religious holidays but rather state simply that school will be closed on dates that correspond with holidays, such as Eid, Yom Kippur and Christmas.

Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state delegate and co-chair of Equality for Eid, was not happy with the board of education’s action Tuesday.

“Equality is really what we’re looking for,” Ali said. “Simply saying we’re not going to call this Christmas, and we’re not going to call this Yom Kippur, and still closing the schools, that’s not equality.”

School board members said they were sympathetic to the desire to have Eid recognized and close schools but that legal precedent in Maryland bars them from closing for religious purposes.

“We can’t close for religious holidays. We can only close for operational purposes,” like high absenteeism, school spokesman Dana Tofig said.

That explanation doesn’t sit well with Zainab Chaudry, with the Council on American Islamic Relations.

“What’s really concerning to us is that similar conditions weren’t placed on any other faith community,” Chaudry says.

In the 1970s school officials decided to close on Jewish holidays because of high absenteeism.

But school board member Michael Durso said that the schools effectively close for a religious reason: the schools had high absenteeism because of a religious holiday in the community.

Noting the attempt to move away from favoring religions by instead referring to school days off as “winter break” and “student holidays,” Durso said as long as the Islamic community’s concern for parity wasn’t somehow addressed “it comes off as insensitive, and I just think we cannot afford to be in that light”.

That drew applause from parents who filled the seats in the board of education’s meeting room.

The adoption of the 2015-2016 school calendar does give students the day off on Eid but only because it happens to fall on another school holiday, Yom Kippur.

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