Albany Schools Consider Closing for Muslim Holy Days
"School was number one and holiday was number two," he recalled last week, many years later, during the public comment period of an Albany city school board meeting. "I did not really have the pleasure of celebrating holidays with the true spirit when I was a kid."
He wants it to be different for his own children, 7-year-old Khalid and 4-year-old Moosa. And so do other members of the local Muslim community.
As the population of students from the Middle East continues to grow in the city of Albany, many Muslims are hoping the school district will allow students the day off when two major religious holidays roll around, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.
It's a move a number of school districts around the country have made in recent years, including New York City and Burlington, Vt. District officials said Friday they are considering the request, and will have the calendar committee take it up for the 2017-18 school year.
"To understand what Eid is, it is like having your child go to school on Christmas Day," said Wafia Sarwer, a member of the Islamic Center of the Capital District in Colonie, who is not related to Haroon Sarwer.
Most schools are closed on major Christian holidays, like Christmas and Good Friday, a symptom of pure numbers. With so many students celebrating them, it would make no sense to keep school open and have to re-teach lessons the next day. In Albany, as in other cities with large Jewish populations, school is also closed for the high holidays — Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
For smaller faith groups, the district allows excused absences for religious observances, though students may still be assigned homework or have to make up tests. Muslims in Albany have followed this practice for years but are now asking for a change as their population has grown significantly.
"When you are celebrating a high holiday and a big feast you want to feel free from everything," said Abdulkadir Elmi, the imam at Albany's Masjid As-Salam on Central Avenue. "But if the kid gets homework, then probably in the evening instead of enjoying and playing with the other kids they will be busy with school. So we would like it to be a completely free day so they will be completely happy and have a complete celebration."
Islam's holidays fall on different days of the lunar calendar each year. Eid Al-Fitr is celebrated with a feast to mark the end of Ramadan and falls on June 25 this year, two days after the last day of school. Al-Adha marks the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca and falls on Sept. 1, three days before Labor Day. Most districts don't kick off the school year until a day or two after Labor Day.
The city's Muslim population has grown exponentially in the 10 years since Elmi was named imam at the mosque, he said. That's in large part because of an influx of immigrants and refugees to the city. A recent Albany High graduate told him about 85 students practice Islam at the high school, he said.
While the school district doesn't track students by faith, it does track them by language in order to provide services to students whose first language isn't English. In just the past year, Arabic surpassed Karen, spoken in Myanmar and Thailand, as the second most popular language in the district after English, said district spokesman Ron Lesko.
Overall, students speak a collective 57 languages in the district — evidence of remarkable growth in the city's immigrant and refugee population. In the past decade, the number of students learning to speak English in the district has soared from 300 to 1,300.
For a long time, the growth was coming from refugee camps in Thailand and other areas of Southeast Asia. This past summer, however, district officials noticed a shift, with more students coming from war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and across the Middle East.
"It is absolutely reflective of the growth our city has seen in our Muslim population," Lesko said. "So this request is one of those things we have to take into consideration as our demographics change and our city becomes more diverse, and we're glad to take it into consideration."
Source: The Times Union
