Valley Stream schools won’t add Diwali to calendar

Trustees from all four school districts in the Central High School District on Jan. 17 voted against a proposal from District 13 Trustee Vinny Pandit to add the Hindu holiday of Diwali to the school calendar for the 2019-20 school year, citing high attendance rates during the holiday.

A school district needs to make a decision about closing school for a religious holiday based on the proportion of students that would miss that day of instruction, John Sheahan, the attorney representing District 13, explained. Last year, the joint boards voted to add Muslim holidays to the calendar for the 2017-18 school year because they determined that about 700 students would be absent on those days.

In District 13, 98 percent of students attended school on Oct. 18, the holiest day of the five-day festival. In District 24, 98 percent of students attended school that day, and in District 30, 97 percent of students attended school that day. At the high school level, attendance was also between 96 and 97 percent, which is the same as any other day of the school year, according to Superintendent Bill Heidenreich.

“There was no drop in attendance whatsoever,” Heidenreich told the Herald in December.

Based on those numbers, several trustees from all four districts expressed their view that it was unnecessary to close school for Diwali. “Statistically, the attendance is very high, so there’s no legal reason to close,” District 13 President Bill Stris said at the joint boards meeting.

Other school districts, including Syosset and East Meadow, added Diwali to their 2017-18 calendars. At the joint boards meeting, Pandit offered their calendars as proof that districts could close for the holy day and still fulfill the legal requirement of 180 days of instruction. But District 30 Trustee Kenneth Cummings said that removing the day of instruction was warranted for those school districts, but not for Valley Stream. “These school districts added the holiday as a result of increase in population … so I think that’s part of what makes the decision is the increase in population,” Cummings said. “When you have a large population where it affects the school it makes sense to do something like that.”

Pandit, however, said that the rate of attendance should not be the only consideration when considering adding the holiday. “On this day, the number cannot be correctly identified, and that is irrelevant at this point, because for our children what matters most is to understand Hinduism and its religious significance, and this can only happen if the schools are closed,” Pandit said, adding that many Hindi feel obligated to send their children to school despite the holiday. “By the time we go in the evening, most of the functions are over, so we just go there, we pray there and it’s time to come back.”

Diwali, or Deepavali, is a five-day celebration commemorating the Hindu new year. The main day of the festival falls on the third day, the darkest night of the Hindu lunar month. On that day, families gather for a prayer to the Hindu goddess Lakshmi and have a feast, clean and decorate their house to let the gods in, and light diyas — or oil lamps — to bring light to the darkest night of the month.

One South High School student, Abigail Arjune, said in December that when she goes to school during Diwali, she does not have the opportunity to perform the rituals associated with the holiday and go to services at Shri Surya Narayan Mandir in Jamaica, Queens. Hoping to remedy that, she sent the Central High School District’s Board of Education a petition with more than 200 signatures to add Diwali to the calendar.

“Every other culture has their own observed holiday, and they are well-known to the nation,” Arjune wrote in the petition. “With all these celebrations of all these cultures, Hindus do not have an observed holiday on the school calendar.”

After each school board privately caucused, the joint boards reconvened and each school board voted not to add Diwali to the calendar. The boards suggested that they would monitor attendance rates during the holiday, and if they see a larger decline in attendance, they would reconsider the motion.

Once the meeting was adjourned, Pandit sighed and said, “I tried.”