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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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?![/quote]

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, [b]learn new material[/b] 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.

[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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