Recently, the Maryland County Board of education cleaned their upcoming 2015-2016 calendar of any holiday references. This decision, which was a 7-to-1 vote, was made after a few Muslim leaders requested that Eid al-Adha, the Muslim equivalent of Christianity’s celebration of Christmas, be mentioned on the school calendar.

The school has already allowed several Jews and Christians, the majority of the local population, breaks for holidays such as Christmas and Yom Kippur, so it only seems fair to acknowledge a Muslim holiday as well. However, rather than taking a reasonable route and adding the single Muslim holiday to the calendar, the district decided to get rid of any holiday mentions altogether.

The Muslim community was outraged as they believed they were denied their right to religious equality. The district seems to think otherwise. They have responded by stating “This decision was made to emphasize that the decision to close school on a particular day is based on operational matters — such as high staff and student absenteeism — and not for religious or cultural reasons,” as Eun Kyung Kim has quoted in her article for Today.

The district was definitely at fault for this one. Schools are funded by tax dollars so it would be wrong to promote any holidays in the first place. There is supposed to be, by a law, a separation of church and state. Along with that, they should have practiced more religious sensitivity to all of their students, but if the school was really worried about that, they wouldn’t have had the Jewish and Christian holidays on the calendar in the first place.