A school board in Maryland this week voted to remove the names of Christian, Jewish and Muslim holidays from its school calendar.
According to the Washington Times, the Montgomery County Public Schools “still will be closed on the holidays, but the board voted 7-1 to move the religious references from the calendar.”
The newspaper reports the Montgomery County Board of Education decided to remove references to religious holidays after receiving complaints from Muslim parents that Eid al-Adha, a holiday which marks the last day of Hajj, was “not getting equal recognition” to the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, both celebrated on Sept. 23.
Rebecca Smondrowski, the school board member who introduced the motion, told MyMCMedia that the decision was “about equality.”
I made the motion because if we are closing for operational reasons, then there should be no need to make reference to religion. That is the most equitable solution that I could see while recognizing that we need to be seriously addressing the criteria for how these things are decided in the future.
According to the Times, Muslim parents and the Maryland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations also petitioned for school to be closed on Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr, the last day of the fasting month of Ramadan. School officials denied the petition because they say closures are not meant to “honor” a particular faith, but rather as a matter of practicality to close on days when many students and teachers would otherwise be absent.
Norman Gordon, an associate pastor of Gaithersburg Presbyterian Church, who has three children in the school system, told the Associated Press “the decision sent a message to all students that their faith is not important.”
“I think, in an effort to be politically correct, they’ve kind of snubbed not just one particular faith tradition, but all three,” Gordon said.
