USA, December 19, 2010 (USA Today, by Stephen Prothero): The school committee in Cambridge, Mass., stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy when it voted in October to include a Muslim holiday on its academic calendar. Though not particularly controversial among local residents, this change earned the ire of Bill O’Reilly, who asked his Fox News viewers, “Are we going to give Hindus a holiday, are we going to do the Wiccan thing?”
Earlier this month, the school committee in Acton-Boxborough, a Boston suburb, voted to close its schools on a Christian holiday (Good Friday) and two Jewish holidays (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah). In the bordering district in Harvard, Mass., the school committee voted last week to scrap religious holidays altogether.
Elsewhere across America, public school districts are wrestling with whether the First Amendment requires inclusion or exclusion when it comes to recognizing religious holy days.Should school districts reflect the growing diversity of their student bodies by including more religions’ holy days? Or does the Constitution demand that public schools exclude days off for religion altogether?
Turning religious holy days into school holidays would seem to violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the state from promoting one religion over another. Closing school for Muslim celebrations obviously promotes Islam — by providing it with both recognition and legitimacy withheld from ostensibly lesser religions. So the only constitutional options here would seem to be to honor all religious holidays, or none.
Practicality, however, says otherwise. And in Acton/Boxborough, it says so in the form of school Superintendent Steve Mills, who refers to himself as a “manager” and his district as a “business operation.” “I don’t think one (religion) is more important than the other,” he told me, but “my job is to take the temperature of the demographics of the community and create a school calendar that makes sense.”
In order to figure out what makes sense in Acton/Boxborough, the school committee sent a questionnaire to parents and staff. Of the 220 teachers who responded, 26 said they would take the day off if school were held on Rosh Hashanah and 91 said they would not come to work if school were held on Good Friday. For Mills, whose substitute teachers’ pool typically tops out at 40, these numbers settled the question. “We are inadvertently disrespecting religions” by honoring only Christianity and Judaism, he admits, but this is an “operational, management thing,” and has nothing to do with religion.
The problem with this pragmatic approach is that it uses the coercive power of the state to legitimize more popular religions while delegitimizing less popular ones. And isn’t that precisely what the First Amendment is intended to prevent?