Jewish Parents Protest School Start Date : Education: Several adults say it was insensitive to begin classes on Rosh Hashanah at six Anaheim campuses. District assures them it won’t happen again.

Classes at six Anaheim schools started Tuesday, even though it was one of the holiest days of the year for Jews. But Jewish parents should rest assured: It won’t happen again, district officials said.

*

“We learned our lesson,” Anaheim City School District Supt. Meliton Lopez said. “We should have worked harder to accommodate this holiday.”

Several Jewish parents protested the district’s decision in May to start classes on Rosh Hashanah, which marks the beginning of the Jewish new year. Lopez said he got two calls from parents last week, and people protested at a school board meeting last spring when school calendars were announced.

“We can’t move our holidays, but they can move the day their school begins,” said Sandra Blumenkranz, a congregant at Fullerton-based Temple Beth Tikvah of North Orange County, which has various activities just for children during High Holy Days.

“When this happens to a Jew, it happens to all Jews,” said Blumenkranz, who noted that other Jewish parents were similarly upset. “What’s important is, this should not happen again. They should know the importance of showing respect to a minority.”

Six of the 21 schools in the year-round Anaheim district started Tuesday. About 4,000 students attend those six schools. The other 15 schools began class in July.

Officials had no estimate of how many Jewish children were held from school to attend synagogue on the first full day of the celebratory holiday, which began at sundown Monday.

“It’s hard to tell, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting attendance,” Lopez said. “There are two teachers we know of who did not come to work, and that’s typical--they take High Holy Days off.”

Lopez said district officials knew in advance that class would begin on the holiday but had little choice in starting on Tuesday.

“It’s not that we’re being insensitive--we knew about it,” Lopez said. “It’s just the first time it’s been an issue.”

Lopez said that when district administrators realized in May that the first day of classes for the six non-year-round schools would fall on Rosh Hashanah, they wanted to renegotiate the September start date with the Anaheim Elementary Education Assn., which represents the teachers.

However, the association did not want to renegotiate the start date without renegotiating the entire year-round school calendar, Lopez said. District officials did not want to revise the calendar because that would have meant changing school dates about a month before classes were scheduled to start for the district’s 15 year-round schools, he said.

“In the future, we’ll just insist that if a Jewish holiday falls on the first day of school, we negotiate at the table until we arrive at agreement,” Lopez said.

Blumenkranz said her two children started classes at a school in the Brea Olinda Unified School District last week. She kept her children out of school Tuesday, and she said she would have asked parents to call or write letters of protest to other school districts if classes had begun on Rosh Hashanah, as they did in Anaheim.

“Either start (class) before the holiday or after,” Blumenkranz said. “But not on the day. You’d think they could have adjusted the schedule somehow.”