School Breaks for Jewish Holidays Bring Lawsuit

On Monday, as the nation’s Jews converge on synagogues to reflect on their sins, the children of Sycamore Community School District in southwest Ohio will get a day off from school--no thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

The ACLU, an organization long devoted to defending the rights of religious and ethnic minorities, has sued the Sycamore district and its elected school board over their decision to declare two High Holy Days school vacation days, including Yom Kippur on Monday.

The decision came last year, when a newly elected school board, prodded by a vocal group of Jewish parents and a supportive superintendent, narrowly voted to make the change. Muslim and Hindu parents responded by asking the school board to designate their religious holidays as vacation days as well.

Absenteeism Problem on Jewish Holidays

So far, those pleas have gone unheeded by district officials, who have insisted that the school calendar was changed not in deference to the Jewish religion but because absenteeism had become a significant problem on those days.

Across the country, Christian holidays, such as Christmas and sometimes Good Friday, are routinely observed as school vacation days. In addition, officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District and school districts in New York City and parts of Connecticut and New Jersey routinely close schools on Judaism’s holiest days.

The courts, until now, have held that if those days-off policies are based on tradition or on pragmatic concerns about high levels of absenteeism, they do not violate the constitutional doctrine of the separation of church and state.

For years, the ACLU and other groups have struggled against the adoption of the Christian holiday of Good Friday as a school day off--with mixed results. But the Sycamore case marks one of the first times that a minority religious group’s bid to have its holiday recognized has drawn the ire of civil libertarians.

The controversy has strained relations among different religious groups in this corner of Ohio. But few have been willing to raise their voices in the legal wrangle. The ACLU suit, which was brought in the U.S. district court for the southern district of Ohio in late August and is expected to go to trial within the next few weeks, only bears the names of ACLU members from the district. When it came time to file legal papers, no representatives of the religious minorities who first brought the complaint to the civil rights organization stepped forward to sign on.

That does not bother Stephen R. Felson, the volunteer ACLU attorney from Cincinnati who is handling the case. Felson is Jewish and lived in Israel for 14 years. But to him, Sycamore’s move is a classic effort by one religious group--in this case, Jews--to get a governmental preference just because its members have enough political power to do so.

When members of majority religions do that, Felson observed, it is unconstitutional. When minority religions do it, he adds, it’s bound to backfire.

“That’s a situation you don’t want to be in--that you shouldn’t be in: that our minority is bigger and more powerful than your minority,” added Felson. “There are a lot of places to fight out your views in the marketplace of ideas. The last place you want to do that is someplace where citizens are voting as to which religion is going to prevail. That’s an establishment of religion and a promotion of one over the other right there.”

Sycamore Supt. Bruce Armstrong contended that the school board voted to cancel classes on Jewish holidays strictly because the absentee levels on those days--about 15% of students stayed home--were preventing the school from providing a “quality school day” to those students who came in.

“It was done with the best of intentions to be sure we had quality school days,” Armstrong said. “We don’t promote any religion. We make decisions based on the quality of education.”

But there is little question that, in voting to establish the new school holidays, the school board relaxed an earlier policy linking absenteeism and days off. Before last year’s vote, the school board had set a threshold of 21% absenteeism as the level at which it would declare a school vacation day. When it adopted a new school calendar last year, it accepted the lower threshold of 15% to justify three new school vacation days: Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Dec. 23, the day before the traditional start of the school’s winter break when many students get an early start on the Christmas holiday.

On all three days, the school’s absentee rate topped 15%.

Armstrong contended that the school board did not relax its criterion for vacation days because two of the new days off are Jewish holidays sought by many Jewish parents. He called the earlier 21% threshold for calling days off “an arbitrary figure that just seemed reasonable to the board at the time . . . It was a starting place.”

“I think the board reserved the right to change its resolution if it saw the best interests of the students and it had an obligation to do so,” he added.

But some Sycamore parents--and the ACLU--perceived a different reason for the change in policy: the election to the school board of Renee Roth, a Jewish parent who had long been a vocal proponent of establishing the High Holidays as school vacation days. Once Roth was elected, Felson pointed out, a proposal that had failed to pass muster with the Sycamore school board suddenly won its blessing on a 3-2 vote.

‘A No-Win Situation for the Community’

If the Sycamore case offers a good test for the ACLU’s legal strategists, it has proved a painful ordeal for the Sycamore community.

Located in the northeast corner of Cincinnati, Sycamore is a melting pot in the making--”America of the future,” boasted Armstrong, in a rare fit of Midwestern hyperbole. A once solidly white citizenry has yielded gradually, and gracefully, to growing numbers of Americans of Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latino descent. In the midst of graceful church spires and solid Jewish synagogues, the soaring minaret of a new Islamic Center recently has sprung up in neighboring Westchester. Sikhs and Hindus and Jains--most of them well-educated and affluent--move easily through the community’s growing ethnic and religious mix.

But the dispute over the Jewish holidays has caused this melting pot to simmer uneasily.

“We’ve reached the point where, regardless of the court’s decision, there will be a group of parents and citizens who are angry,” said Michael Rapp, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Cincinnati. “If there is no change in policy, there will be Muslim and Hindu families who will feel put upon. If they do change the policy, there will be Jewish families who will feel put upon. It’s a no-win situation for the community.”

Rapp noted that many Jewish families opposed adoption of school holidays for the High Holy Days and that many non-Jews supported the policy “because they thought it was a sensitive and right thing to do in an era of diversity.”

“I don’t think anyone started down this path with malevolent intentions,” Rapp said. But now, “the hard feelings come out in spurts. It comes out when these issues are discussed in board meetings. It comes out when suits are filed, when stories are aired.”