Howard County schools consider Lunar New Year and Muslim holiday requests

The focus on how public schools handle religious and cultural holidays continued Monday night in Howard County, with requests to accommodate the Lunar New Year and a Muslim holy day on next year’s calendar.

Students and parents in Howard’s Asian-American community asked that a county-wide professional development day be scheduled to coincide with the Lunar New Year in 2016, to enable students to celebrate the popular holiday with family and friends.

“If kids aren’t given the chance to celebrate a holiday, they will probably forget about it, and then it takes away a part of the culture’s traditions,” said Stone Li, a sixth-grader, testifying at a public hearing filled with supporters of the Lunar New Year request.

At the same hearing, a Muslim leader from Montgomery County asked that the name of the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha be given equal billing with Yom Kippur on Howard’s calendar document.

Saqib Ali, a former state delegate and a co-chair of the Equality for Eid Coalition, told the Howard school board that for 2015 both holidays fall on Sept. 23 and should be listed side-by-side on the calendar. Ali had made a similar argument in Montgomery County.

“There’s no constitutional issue related to this,” Ali said. “There’s no church and state separation issues related to this. And of course there’s no impact on the actual operation of the schools because schools are already closed on this day. All we’re asking is that you change that little piece of paper, the designation on the academic calendar.”

Howard’s school board is expected to take action on the calendar issues at a Jan. 15 meeting.

The Lunar New Year proposal already has received support from the district’s calendar committee. Howard school officials said Tuesday that a professional day at that time of year supports the instructional program.

Linfeng Chen, a Howard father of three, described the Lunar New Year as the biggest and most important holiday in east and southeast Asia and noted that more than16 percent of Howard’s population is Asian.

“It’s time to recognize the Lunar New Year, to recognize the diversity of this county,” he said.

The school board’s planned action in January would come two months after Montgomery County decided to strike the names of all religious holidays from its school calendar, a decision that touched off an angry backlash from people of many faiths.

Montgomery officials made the calendar decision after the Eid coalition requested that Eid al-Adha be named as prominently on the calendar as Yom Kippur. A board majority said the best option was to remove all religious holidays from the calendar, which it said would reflect that the days off school are given because of state law and high rates of absenteeism, not to observe religious occasions.

Montgomery school officials have said the law restricts them from giving days off for religious holidays.

Many Maryland school systems include the namesof religious holidays on their calendars, though many Northern Virginia systems do not.

Howard County has had a policy of closing schools on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur since 1979. School officials said the decision was made because the number of staff and student absences on those holidays affected the delivery of instruction.

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