I live in an area with a large Jewish community. The kids get a couple of days off a year for Jewish holidays. I assume absenteeism would be ridiculous otherwise. It makes sense to bend a little to meet the needs or desires of your community, and nobody here seems the least bit upset over it. It’s a far cry from the polar opposite, where a conservative christian website is calling all muslims ‘satanist muslimites’ or some such nonsense.
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But you could make a four day weekend out of it.
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In Jewish areas they pay attention and give those days off for everyone, I have even heard of first week of deer season in rural areas. If there is critical mass then it makes perfect sense to give them and everyone the day off.
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I don’t understand what everyone here or in NY is thinking.
Why would any school care about if a child has one religious day versus the next?
Beyond the fact that people are ‘sorry’ for insulting anyone’s religious beliefs, why even pay any attention?
Separation of church and state is the only answer.
Broe, it’s two weeks for hunting season…
Free food to eat for a whole years time? I’m in.
Public schools do not get funding for the day if their student population falls below a certain number. This is probably the real reason for non-Christian religious days off in some areas.
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What’s the profile of the teaching staff?
NYC public schools are off on Yom Kippur, both days of Rosh Hashanah, and all of Passover (spring break is timed to coincide with Passover, even when it’s super late or super early). While only a tiny fraction of the student population is Jewish, there are still a ton of Jewish teachers (and in the middle of the 20th century a majority of the teaching staff and almost all of the teachers’ union leadership was Jewish).
True, although the NYCDOE docks individual schools’ budgets for student absenteeism, so there’s a lot of pressure from some principals not to pull kids from school for things like vacations.
Good point. I didn’t think about that. I haven’t seen a single Indian teacher. I assume many are Jewish.
This reminds me of when libertarians say that we should just do away with state-certified marriage altogether as a “solution” to the gay marriage issue.
It’s no solution at all to look at a day when people aren’t going to show up for the same reason, and then just throw your hands up in the air and say, “Oh well!” It doesn’t violate the separation of church and state to look at the de facto reasons people want a day off, and just give it to them because it’s a significant enough number, meanwhile not discriminating against those people who believe differently.
I believe kids should get days off to observe(!) astronomical events. All of them.
In turn, we can scratch the annual state-mandated christmas donkey and easter bunny mass schizophrenia.
Once that is accomplished, maybe we will no longer feel the need to sponsor other sectarian ideas from the next-to-last millenia that are neither particularly progressive nor liberal, just so we can feel progressive and liberal.
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In my case its a little different, because I and most of my coworkers have to work xmas, its just a matter if whether we get overtime. I understand that students might just not show up, so different scenario. But you could always just give floating holidays. Want arbor day off? Go right ahead…
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Most people don’t work in jobs where arbitrary absence is feasible (without overstaffing to fill in, and good luck getting that past the beancounters.) If half your assembly line doesn’t show up, you may as well send the rest of them home too, and then you’re back to just adding holidays, because you have to do the same thing when it’s the second (and third and fourth) group’s turn to stay home. Same with running a classroom where some significant percentage of the pupils are off — might as well send everyone to recess or something because you’re going to have to repeat that day’s lesson anyway.
Most observable astronomical events take place well outside of school hours.
But most jobs in the US require accommodation for arbitrary absence now in the form of sick days. Even though many seem to resent this, because it requires them to be more fully staffed, bucking the trend of laying people off and overloading the responsibilities of fewer people. If they need time off for their life, they will take it. This can mean using paid sick days, and even going over into unpaid sick time where the businesses overhead/production/distribution/etc costs can easily exceed that of a few absences, or even extra people.
Also, most jobs seem to at least pay lip service to multiculturalism and religious tolerance, so this puts them on the spot when they balk at taking off the 5-6 days for Durga Puja.
… which is why you should get the next day off.
Because children are expected to be in school, and truancy laws and disciplinary records affect those who miss school even for religious reasons.
Expected by whom? Schools are there to provide an educational service, not to dictate terms. It’s honestly not very difficult to find examples of places and activities more educational than grade school.
In any case, it’s better to explicitly negotiate your family’s place in the community, rather than place yourselves subject to their expectations.
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Expected by the state. Good luck on negotiating with truancy officers, social services, etc., that there are lots of things more educational than grade school.
I’m sure the Muslim families that would be affected if not for this shift in policy are heartened by your statement that they should be explicitly negotiating their community’s place in the system, rather than placing themselves subject to the system’s expectations. It’s almost like you single-handedly solved #Blacklivesmatter with your suggestion.
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I’d say that it is not a matter of “luck”, but rather effort and persistence. It would be naive to expect that truancy officers and social services would engage your family as equals, but it is the families responsibility to force them to do so. Once you concede, your family becomes politically insolvent and basically forfeit, so what’s the incentive?
Our purpose (in my family, at least) is that “education” provides tools for learning about the world at large, and how to set and achieve goals in it. We don’t accept the state having an agenda of its own, it is merely a front for other people such as ourselves. If the state wants to make a case that we should be socialized to whatever their nebulous goals supposedly are, then they need to discuss this with us directly, just like anybody else. Obviously, poor social conditioning which puts the state in charge of its citizens without any mutuality or reciprocity would undermine both our civic responsibility, as well as the development of our offspring. So we would need to go on the offensive.
Well, it beats petitioning for acceptance. But no, it is anything but easy. The reality of it is quite dangerous.
