Why did FCPS screw up on Diwali?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think Diwali is a day they give off for anyway. It’s just an observation day meaning that there will be no tests or assignments due.

This.

[Anonymous]

OP, you are looking at the problem from the wrong direction. FCPS is obligated by law to provide 180 school days a year or 990 hours of instruction. Every time a holiday is added, FCPS has to rework its schedule to fit the needs of the students, administrators and faculty while staying within its budget AND meet the legal minimum of 180 days or 990 hours. It's not easy. So, sometimes holiday have to be merged, as in Presidents' Day, which was once separate holidays in Feb for Washington or Lincoln, or scheduled in such a way to meet all of the other demands on it

[Anonymous]

+1. There's also the teacher unions who argue for holidays on Mondays and Fridays to give its members three day weekends.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Schools should not be off on religious holidays in the first place. If your family celebrates a religious holiday your kid should be allowed to stay home that day with an excused absence. They should not close the whole school system down so you can celebrate.

What happened to the separation of church and state in America?! If I wanted that, I would have stayed in my own country, not immigrated here.

Why do all the schools close on basically every religious holiday?!

Yes, let's have school on Christmas Day. Bring it on. Oh wait, we should have that one off? Majority rules, I guess. Hope you aren't ever in the minority. (And I celebrate Christmas.)

This argument is a logic fail.

Let me guess, you celebrate Christmas. Lots of holidays get combined/not observed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You're all completely missing the point because you're so scared of other races and religions. The point was why did FCPS say that tomorrow is Diwali when today is Diwali?

Because it’s when they’re observing Diwali. If the (at most, likely) 15% of students who ACTUALLY observe Diwali needed to miss today, they would be excused. For everyone else they observe Diwali tomorrow

And teachers? Do you think there’s enough subs?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Schools should not be off on religious holidays in the first place. If your family celebrates a religious holiday your kid should be allowed to stay home that day with an excused absence. They should not close the whole school system down so you can celebrate.

What happened to the separation of church and state in America?! If I wanted that, I would have stayed in my own country, not immigrated here.

Why do all the schools close on basically every religious holiday?!

Yes, let's have school on Christmas Day. Bring it on. Oh wait, we should have that one off? Majority rules, I guess. Hope you aren't ever in the minority. (And I celebrate Christmas.)

This argument is a logic fail.

Let me guess, you celebrate Christmas. Lots of holidays get combined/not observed.

Christmas is a national holiday.

[Anonymous]

I'm Hindu and I don't think school should be closed on Halloween. It's a culturally significant day in America and there are not many where we can celebrate our common cultural traditions.

The day after makes perfect sense on many levels and is still a great way to recognize Diwali this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm Hindu and I don't think school should be closed on Halloween. It's a culturally significant day in America and there are not many where we can celebrate our common cultural traditions.

The day after makes perfect sense on many levels and is still a great way to recognize Diwali this year.

I just wanted to add - the blowback would be huge. You really don't want that OP, it's not worth it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No one cares about these dumb religious holidays. Its end of quarter teacher workdays but they gave a nod to some holidays to be "inclusive"

1 percent of the county celebrates Diwali.
We can’t do this for every holiday.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Diwali is TODAY yet FCPS gave the kids off tomorrow. Did they really screw up or do they just not care and are using Diwali as an excuse for an end of quarter day off? Tomorrow is not Diwali, TODAY is Diwali.

FWIW, the government holiday for Diwali in India is on Friday, per my colleagues there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Schools should not be off on religious holidays in the first place. If your family celebrates a religious holiday your kid should be allowed to stay home that day with an excused absence. They should not close the whole school system down so you can celebrate.

What happened to the separation of church and state in America?! If I wanted that, I would have stayed in my own country, not immigrated here.

Why do all the schools close on basically every religious holiday?!

I think the exact same thing! Have school on Christmas. I don’t care. I don’t need two weeks of school Closed in Dec either.

I love Christmas and celebrate with my
Family. Most of the country does for religion or tradition, but I don’t care if you have school on that day.

Separation of church and state. These are public schools - not religious schools. Stop closing them. Diwali is celebrated by 1 percent of the people in this country yet we are closing schools for them all. ALL Kids need to be educated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm Hindu and I don't think school should be closed on Halloween. It's a culturally significant day in America and there are not many where we can celebrate our common cultural traditions.

The day after makes perfect sense on many levels and is still a great way to recognize Diwali this year.

Schools have never been closed for Halloween any place I have ever lived in the US.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm Hindu and I don't think school should be closed on Halloween. It's a culturally significant day in America and there are not many where we can celebrate our common cultural traditions.

The day after makes perfect sense on many levels and is still a great way to recognize Diwali this year.

Schools have never been closed for Halloween any place I have ever lived in the US.

Duh. The point is whether it should have been closed this yr bc it was also Diwali the same day. That PP is saying No.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Schools should not be off on religious holidays in the first place. If your family celebrates a religious holiday your kid should be allowed to stay home that day with an excused absence. They should not close the whole school system down so you can celebrate.

What happened to the separation of church and state in America?! If I wanted that, I would have stayed in my own country, not immigrated here.

Why do all the schools close on basically every religious holiday?!

It is one of the consequences left over from the last school board.

The last school board decided that they wanted to recognize non Christian holidays in the FCPS calendar and schedule. If I am remembering correctly, the argument was that since Christmas was off due to it being a federal holiday and falling over winter break, that it was not equitable to non Christians (completely disregarding that even it was not over break, FCPS could not hold classes on Christmas because absences would be extraordinarily high due to nearly all of the FCPS families pulling their kids from school Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and likely through New Years eve.)

The district formed an ecumenical committee of representatives from various faiths: Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, etc. The committee studied attendance patterns of the district on religious holidays, and came up with a fairly short list of non-Christian holidays where.the attendance could justify offering a day off school, or a half day. I believe the short list hit 3, maybe 4 major holidays, such as Diwali, Eid, and I think either Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah (it was one of the two). The list was fair, and based off staff and student attendance.

The school board got the list and completely ignored the committee work, like they always do. They decided it was not equitable, and then added a ton of additional religious and cultural holidays, giving days off for some and saying that schools could not give tests, assign homework, learn new material have games, concerts, or anything substantive on any of the days.

They added days like Day of the Dead and Orthodox Christmas to the list. They would acknowledge some holidays but ignored others on the same day. For example, they sent out weekly email recognitions celebrating Ramadan, but did not mention Passover, Lent, Ash Wednesday, or Easter occuring at the same time. Or they recognize Day of the Dead on November 1st, but did not mention All Saints Day. It became something well intentioned that morphed into a huge, virtue signalling mess that disrupted learning. By taking sides and picking more obscure religious holidays just to be inclusive, instead of the attendance stats based holiday list from the ecumenical committee, FCPS overloaded the calendar with inconvenient days off, pushed the end of the year to mid June instead of early June, and created a scheduling mess for everyone.

The peak of idiocy came a couple years ago. The students wend from late September through I think late January with only 4 or 5 uninterrupted full weeks of classes. Every other week was 3 or 4 days, with a few 2 day weeks broken up like Monday school, Tuesday and Wednesday off, Thursday school with no new material, tests or games, Fridsy school. Then, the school board picked the wrong day for Eid. It happened to be an AP exam date, so FCPS withdrew all students from the AP exams for that day. Then, around 3 weeks out, they realized they had the wrong day, so FCPS withdrew all FCPS students for a 2nd day of AP testing and told them they could not test on either day, the real Eid date or the wrong Eid date.

After an uproar from parents, students and teachers, including muslim families, FCPS allowed students to take the AP test on actual Eid, but still did not allow them to take AP exams on wrong Eid. It was a mess, all because of FCPS school board once again over riding recommendations from a committee they created that did not give them the result they wanted.

It is still a mess, but at least the kids appear to be able to learn new material on the religious holidays.

That’s not quite right. The committee picked the days for clearly religious reasons. The data did not actually show a significant jump on those days that suggested an operational need to close.

They first tried to side step closures with the O day approach and added more because a few board members pointed out (in trying to illustrate that we can’t cover every blessed holiday) that other days were left out when just the 4 were cherry picked. O days were a mess initially when they had the no new content rule but better after they removed that.

The SB and FCPS still felt like they needed to hand out this favor to those religious groups that had been lobbying so hard for the days off so they went ahead and did it anyway.

[Anonymous]

I respect all this. AND Children learn best with consistency. How can you learn a language or math with all these interruptions.

They make a big deal about attendance but we can barely get 5 day weeks. Consistency in showing up to learn and practice things that require daily practice will improve education.

It is such a joke to have all these days off. There isn’t time in the summer anymore to do specialty camps, Grandmas house, a job or anything with 8 weeks. I didn’t appreciate the long summers before but scheduling now is such an unnecessarily complicated.