At this rate, city kids will be in school until the end of July.
Now that leading mayoral candidates Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota have both vowed to add two Muslim holidays to the public school calendar, advocates for other religious and ethnic groups are clamoring for their days to be recognized too.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver jumped into the brewing holy war Friday, saying the city should consider giving kids the day off for the Chinese New Year.
“I think the city has to recognize (Chinese New Year),” said Silver, a Democrat whose district includes Chinatown in lower Manhattan. “We don’t want to take away from the learning days, but we have to adjust the calendar appropriately to include all of the major populations that we have.”
There are currently at least two bills in Albany that would give city school kids extra time off.
One would close schools on the Chinese New Year. The other would close on the two Muslim Eid holidays that Lhota and de Blasio want to recognize: Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, which celebrates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail.
Neither bill has garnered much support, but Silver expects they’ll both be looked at again now that there’s a change coming to City Hall. The bills also wouldn’t be needed if the new mayor wanted to simply add the holidays to the calendar.
Also jumping into the vacation fray is City Councilman Daniel Dromm, a Queens Democrat who represents ethnically diverse Jackson Heights.
Dromm introduced a resolution in July to close school on the holy day of Diwali, a festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains.
A spokesman for Lhota said he’d consider adding other holidays. De Blasio has said he supports adding the Chinese New Year, but his campaign wouldn’t comment on Diwali.
Mayor Bloomberg has resisted adding holidays to avoid clashes in a city of immigrants. “When you have a city as diverse as New York, you simply cannot add a holiday for every religion,” Bloomberg spokesman Jake Goldman said. “The city hasn’t added a school holiday since Martin Luther King Day in 1986 for that reason.”
Kids must attend school for a total of 183 days, so any holidays would have to be made up during the year.