Jesus returns -- to district’s school calendar

After an absence of nearly 20 years, Christmas is back on the calendar at high schools throughout Bakersfield and surrounding communities.

At a contentious meeting Thursday, board members of one of the largest secondary-school districts in the state voted to change “winter recess” to “Christmas recess” and “spring recess” to “Easter recess.”

Officials of the 36,000-student Kern High School District said they were reclaiming terms that had been needlessly washed away by a tide of political correctness in the late 1980s. The district is just the latest of several nationwide that have taken such action in the last year or two.

“I don’t buy the secular atheist agenda that we should expunge all religious dialogue from the public forum,” said board member Chad Vegas, a recently elected Bakersfield pastor who called for the renaming. “I don’t believe we should exclude a traditional American holiday from the calendar under the pressure of political correctness.”

But Rabbi Cheryl Rosenstein wasn’t swayed by Vegas’ assertions that no offense was meant to non-Christians.

“He indicated that he didn’t intend to make minorities feel like second-class citizens,” she said, “but we have to acknowledge that people who aren’t Christian can potentially feel that way. It’s no secret that Christmas and Easter are two of the most sacred holidays on the Christian calendar.”

Rosenstein, who leads the 170 families of Temple Beth El, Bakersfield’s largest Jewish congregation, called the board’s 4-1 vote “tremendously disappointing.” She said board members appeared to brush off a letter she presented that was signed by a dozen local religious leaders representing Muslims, Methodists, Catholics and other groups.

“Please leave spiritual matters to us in our homes and houses of worship, where they properly belong,” the letter said.

The discussion in Bakersfield echoed debates before school boards in other conservative communities around the country. In Missouri, criminal defense attorney Dee Wampler has persuaded about seven mostly small districts to change their calendars, and next year aims to do the same in St. Louis.

“I try to downplay the Christian or religious standpoint and emphasize our history, tradition and culture,” he said. “There’s this effort to bring Kwanzaa and other things into the schools, but the fact that we’re allowing Muslims and others to immigrate to our country doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice our tradition.”

In Scottsdale, Ariz., the conservative legal group Alliance Defense Fund has sent lengthy “information letters” to 11,500 school districts “reminding school officials that they and all Americans still have the right to free speech -- that it’s OK to celebrate Christmas, even in public,” said Mike Johnson, the group’s senior counsel.

“Most school officials don’t have a personal agenda to silence religious expression,” said Johnson, who advised board members changing the calendar in a Colorado Springs district. “But rather than take on leftist groups making demands, they just bow to the pressure.”

With Christmas a federal holiday and the Supreme Court’s approval of some Nativity displays on public property, the law sides with people who want their children to enjoy a Christmas break instead of a winter break, he said.

In California, vacation designations are left to local districts, said a spokesman for the California School Boards Assn. But many districts voluntarily opted for “winter” over Christmas after a 1988 law required state agencies to do so, Kern High School District officials said.

Board member Ken Mettler said he found no indication that the Bakersfield board held a hearing on the matter at the time -- an omission he felt was corrected on Thursday.

“We shouldn’t arbitrarily change things like this without public input,” said Mettler, who engineered a similar change two years ago as a board member of the rural Rosedale elementary district.

To Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the effort at liberation seemed needlessly divisive.

“Why would public school administrators take in-your-face actions that might alienate some students?” he said. “I can only ask them: What would Jesus do?”

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steve.chawkins@latimes.com