Apparently, Florida’s Hillsborough County School District has tried to take religion off the calendar, resulting in almost everyone—religious or not—taking Good Friday off. As reported in the St. Petersburg Times on Monday:
After most Hillsborough students skipped classes on Good Friday, superintendent MaryEllen Elia initially used religion to explain the huge disparities in absentee rates between schools.
“Schools reflect their particular community. You may have in a community a particular religious affiliation that is strong,” Elia said.
This morning, the Times’ editors saw things differently:
The Hillsborough County School District should be embarrassed by the mess it made of classes on Good Friday. This was a regular school day, included on the calendar. Yet rather than function as normal, the district made clear to religious conservatives and overindulgent parents that students and staff could blow off the school day.
This issue should have been settled. Hillsborough spent two years wrangling in the national limelight over the calendar before agreeing to a secular schedule that recognized no religious holidays. Yet rather than hold fast to a decision already made and vetted by a committee of school officials and parents, the district gave a wink and a nod to treat Good Friday as an unofficial holiday.
The massive confusion over whether Good Friday was really a holiday led not only to many kids missing school for religious activities, but lots heading to the malls and beaches for more secular observances. It’s a somewhat extreme example of what regularly happens with one-size-fits-all public schooling: When you try to legislate away the values held by one group, you often end up creating havoc for everyone, whether with school calendars, textbook adoptions, freedom of speech, and the list goes on.
But how can we avoid these constant clashes and crashes? Oh, right: Instead of forcing everyone to support a single system, we could let parents use their public education dollars to choose their children’s schools. Then religious folks could pick schools with acceptable calendars, mathematical traditionalists could get the “old” math, conservative parents could choose which penguins their children read about, and so on.
But, of course, all that freedom would never work, right? It would just lead to chaos…
