By Betselot Wondimu ’15

On November 11, MCPS’s Board of Education voted 7-1 to only list days of school closed for the 2015-16 school year while not relating those days to any holidays. The vote came after outrage from the county’s Muslim community, whose protests to close schools on two of their main holidays were rejected with a Board vote of 5¬2 last year.

The Board’s most recent vote represents a major failure for two reasons. First, the Board is insinuating that removing the names of respected Christian and Jewish holidays is equivalent to recognizing Muslim holidays. This is a miserable attempt by the Board to avoid the actual issue and appease a cognizant Muslim community. Second, the rationale for not closing school on Muslim holidays is that, considering the small Muslim population in MCPS, it would be unfair to close school for its holidays and not for other religious minorities. This argument is terribly flawed; it is based on census data from the 1970s and does not take the changing religious demographics of the Washington-Metropolitan area into account. No progress will be made until the Board stops flaunting a façade of harmony.