Junior English major

For years, Muslims in Montgomery County have been trying to get the Board of Education to recognize at least one of their most important religious holidays, specifically, Eid al-Adha. The other major Muslim holiday is Ramadan.

In 2015, Eid al-Adha will fall on Sept. 23, the same day as Yom Kippur, which would seem like a perfect avenue to finally grant that request.

However, to “alleviate” Muslims’ qualms, the Board of Education decided not to add Eid al-Adha to the school calendar, but instead to remove Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana from the 2015-16 calendar. Students will still be off from school on all of those days, but the reasons will not be denoted on the school calendar. Along with the elimination of the holidays, Christmas break will now be referred to as winter break.

What was meant to be an act of inclusiveness toward the Muslim community turned out to be an act of religious inequality. Most definitely, religion should be kept out of public schools at all times. Removing all religious holidays from the school calendar seems like a good idea in theory because it is supposed to create a sense of inclusivity among all students, no matter their religious identifications. But when the Montgomery County Board of Education decided to put this into practice, all inclusivity went out the window.

Instead, the decision read to many individuals, including me, as a backhanded insult to the Muslim community, the board essentially saying, “Oh, you want equality and inclusivity? Well, we’ll just remove all holidays, but, you know, still give time off for them even though we’re not specifically going to say why.” It’s almost like when a little kid takes a ball away from his friends because he didn’t get his way.

The Board of Education decides whether school should be canceled based on the potential for absenteeism from class. And one of the reasons it never added Muslim holidays to the calendar is that the Muslim population in Montgomery County does not warrant enough absences to close school for the Eid al-Adha.

Instead, students who wish to stay home and celebrate the holiday are permitted excused absences. But why should Muslim students miss a whole day of school while their Jewish and Christian classmates get one day or sometimes several days off from school to celebrate their holidays?

It’s not like Islam is some obscure religion only a handful of people celebrate worldwide. Islam is one of the largest religions, with about 23 percent of the globe’s population practicing it.

The Board of Education’s decision to eliminate religious holidays from the calendar also throws a blanket of neutrality and indifference over diversity. By not acknowledging any religious holidays, the Board of Education is almost teaching intolerance, and it is not providing avenues for students to understand that they live in a diverse world with a plethora of religions.

It all comes down to the matter of equity, which the Board of Education thought it was promoting by not denoting religious holidays on the school calendar. If the board wanted legitimate equity and inclusiveness, then it should have either added Eid al-Adha to the calendar or completely eliminated all religious holidays from the calendar by keeping school in session and permitting excused absences.

Maggie Cassidy is a junior English major and opinion editor. She can be reached at mcassidydbk@gmail.com.