Right, but would your supervisor/manager/department chair approve requests to have 80% of the staff gone on a scheduled work day? Probably not. At least not in my experience.
If you’re in a situation where 80% of the staff and students have a religious obligation that will keep them from coming in that day, that’s a pretty good reason not to be open that day.
Again, and in my experience only, I can’t imagine a business operating in that manner.
My original question was, why is it different for public school teachers? Law, unions, or just practice?
Currently kids have no school on various days for teacher in-service, teacher conferences, parent-teacher conferences, election days (because polling places are in school buildings), Veterans Day and Presidents Day which are rarely workplace holidays (unless you work for a financial institution or the post office), fall break and spring break.
Parents have, for decades (literally these random days off have existed since I was in elementary school in the 70s and 80s) found childcare for those days as needed. Adding two days mid-year when childcare will be needed isn’t that big an issue.
So kids who need religious holidays off from school have to scramble to make up for missed works? So teachers have to use floating holidays or sick days to maintain observance? So schools open (and lose money, in multiple ways) on days when huge portions of the students aren’t present? Why?
It’s a nice principle, we’re going to be wholly secular, look at us, ignoring the fact that people engage in religious observation, it’s all fair because we ignore it for everybody – except people who celebrate Christmas – and we’re so enlightened. But it’s ridiculous in practice, because mass absences create far more classroom disruption than a day off.
I went through school in some pretty conservative Christian areas and I never ever, not even once, got a Christian religious holiday off.
I think the juvenile delinquents who got sent to Catholic school got Good Friday off. The rest of us didn’t.
Now granted, Christmas fell during winter vacation, but even then it was more a secular holiday than a religious one.
(Secular = celebrated by retail entities countrywide. Religious = celebrated just by people of that religion.)
So, no. Kids who need special religious days off should get the chance to make up their work, and should have an excused absence. They are not doing so very much work on any given day in the first place.
Of course, you really only have two big ones. Christmas, as you say, has become very secularized, but you still have it off from school, and Easter is on a Sunday.
I guess I don’t see how the “well, we don’t get any holidays off, so you shouldn’t either” argument really applies.
It depends. Private employers are governed here by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which, among other things, prohibits employers discriminating against employees due to their religion, and requires them to provide reasonable accommodations for religious practices. Here’s the EEOC handbook detailing this.
Section 12: Religious Discrimination | U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
And, some states have more protections. For instance, here’s part of New York State’s Human Rights Law:
Some states, though, provide a higher standard for public employees. So, for instance, in Illinois, there are these laws, which the Western Illinois University website lays out:
http://www.wiu.edu/policies/religiousobserv.php
As you can see there, students are excused from classes for religious holidays, and state employees can given the right to take either paid or unpaid leave for holidays.
I didn’t say we shouldn’t get any holidays off. I said they should be excused absences as I don’t see why everybody has to take them. Especially as we get into dozens of religions.
If you have Christian holidays off then you should have the same number of Jewish and Islamic holidays as well. Suck it up, buttercup. All or none.
No. You give everyone the day off for any day that is holy to any significant percent of the population, regardless of how many days any given group might have. Since the number of days that everyone must attend school remains the same, the number of interruptions for days based on any given religion are irrelevant. Anyone who gets offended because Muslims get TWO days off, (Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha) can take consolation in the fact that as the lunar year cycles around, Ramadan will run into summer, when school is closed, anyway, they will have NO special holidays, that year.
Do I have a claim against my employer since they cancelled the Good Friday holiday?
When I worked it a department of 30, it wasn’t much of a problem. But I also worked in a department of 3, and only two of us could realistically do the same job.
So we traded. You have Good Friday, then I will take Christmas Eve.
There was no way that our boss would approve of us both having PTO on the same day, since there were only two of us.
YMMV.
I don’t think you do, since it’s a question of reasonable accommodation, and it’s likely not a reasonable accommodation to let 2 out of 3 people in a department out at once, but you can feel free to call the EEOC and explain the situation to them.
Is there any situation where 80% simply don’t show up for work that can be considered a reasonable accommodation? I doubt it.
That was the original claim.
Probably not, but that’s not what the thread is about, is it? Isn’t the thread about whether or not New York should close schools for Muslim holidays?
Just as a data point - I went to a school that was at least 25% Mulsim, pupils and teachers. Muslims got an extra hour off on Friday lunchtime for prayers, and also took off Eids with the permission of the school/education department.
The rest of us didn’t get that time off, but I don’t think it was ever an issue.
Anyway, this is to say, I have no problem with NYC doing Islamic holidays in addition to others, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they didn’t.
The first sentence makes an excellent point. What about Neopagans, for whom Halloween is an important holiday, but who remain statistically insignificant in absolutely every school district? “Suck it, Pagans, your numbers are too small: try to move your holy days to match the Big Three.” In other words, there will always be people whose religion cannot be accomodated, and that’s a good reason to consider requiring everyone to have the same burden, even the numerically dominant Christians. After all, not every member of a population is going to celebrate the holidays in a time-intensive way. My family was nominally Christian growing up, and I had never even heard of Good Friday until I was in college. None of the Christian holidays would have been a problem for school attendance.
I understand the real practical difficulties mentioned upthread, but I think the burden of accommodating the religious should be on the religious, not the public at large. YMMV (and clearly does, since every single school district in the universe disagrees with me).
The second sentence is bizarre. I just quoted it for context.
You are fixated on that “80%” for no reason.
The statement was an off-hand remark indicating that a very large number of teachers and students in a hypothetical district would want to celebrate a specific holiday at home or their place of worship. The (hypothetical) school district avoided the problem by making that an off day.
There was no claim that any district had actually been threatened by a walk-out to which threats it had capitulated. Going on, at length, about the the rights and responsibilities of an employer in granting arbitrarily chosen days off to random employees addresses a non-issue that is not part of the general discussion and you appear to want to turn it into a hijack.
If it is so important, go open a new thread to discuss it, (remembering, all the while, that you have misunderstood the statement to which you are reacting).
[ /Moderating ]
From a teacher’s point of view, it’s an issue. The day ends up being much less effective for everyone, and creates a significant burden on the teachers. School is not just a series of worksheets you can hand to kids to make up–if it were, we’d just do that. Some activities simply can’t be done with large numbers of students missing (discussions); some can’t be practically made up (such as labs); some can be recreated, such as demonstrations, but doing so requires teachers and students alike to meet outside the instructional day. Some kids simply can’t do this. Others can, but not all at the same time–so teachers have to reteach the lesson multiple times over many days, and some kids will never get it. Because of the time lag, they can’t do anything that day that is built on the next, since a large number of the kids will be lost.
Sure, these things are all true when you have one or two kids missing, as well, but you can meet with one or two kids, work around one or two kids, assign a student to help one or two kids. 25% of your class is different.
So teachers have to structure their entire instructional calendar to make whatever is planned on those holidays “enrichment” at best. It generally ends up being less useful, and the whole day is kind of low-energy, low-focus–it’s a bad vibe that carries over. You are killing time and the kids know it and it affects the tone of the class going forward.
Over a certain %, much, much better to just let everyone stay home and add the day back in somewhere else.
Because a school is a community, as I said above. It’s simply about numbers, not a commentary at all on the reason for or legitimacy of the event.
The above is true, and absolutely irrelevant to the OP:
“While the mayor said the policy is being created to reflect diversity in the city, critics of the plan are quick to question whether giving students more days off from school is the best decision.”
Of course you close schools if there will be huge absences. Hello??? McFly??? But that’s NOT why NYC did it. The stated purpose was to “reflect diversity.” Therefore, those posters making the argument, “if you’re recognizing one religion, recognize ALL,” are applying impeccable logic. NYC would end up with an idiotic calendar, but it would accomplish the mayor’s stated goal to “reflect diversity.”
Districts already have a way to deal with days of historically low attendance: they call them “Days of Low Attendance.” Duh. It’s what rural districts do in Michigan for the open of Deer Season. You don’t need a “holiday” to schedule a day off.
Missed the edit window. Bolding below mine
No, read the OP’s link. In NYC, it absolutely is a commentary on “the reason for or legitimacy of the event.”