Written by Don Byrd
In Montgomery County, Maryland, the Board of Education voted to remove references to religious holidays from the school calendar. While students still receive the days off, the calendar no longer refers to the breaks as Christmas, or Easter, for example.
In an op-ed for Religion News Service, the Baptist Joint Committee’s Brent Walker discusses the issue for schools of accommodating the religious schedule of an increasingly multi-faith student population.
The schools’ first act of accommodation should be a generous excusal policy for individual students wishing to be absent from school to celebrate a religious holiday.
Although public schools must not recognize religious holidays or call off school for religious reasons, they may mandate districtwide closures when religious excusals reach a critical mass and the school day would be seriously disrupted by widespread absenteeism. This would be a matter of administrative convenience — a proper secular purpose — not an endorsement of any religion or religious holiday.
. . . The answer for Montgomery County, at least for now, may be to extend a generous excusal policy to the Muslim population. But, the county’s refusal to identify the religious reason for the days off does not solve the problem and only invites unfounded criticism of hostility to Christmas and the other religious holidays.
Read the whole thing.
