… So I wrote to the paper
Took out a personal ad
And though I’m nobody’s poet
I thought it wasn’t half bad
The children at the local public schools in Long Island City will not be getting off for Cinco De Mayo tomorrow. They did get off for Eid al-Fitr on Monday, and will also get off for Juneteenth, which has been newly added to the holiday calendar this year. Except in 2022 it will actually be on June 20 as the 19th falls on a Sunday. In so doing, the extra day off pushes the NYC public school calendar into another week making Monday, June 27th the last day of school.
That’s not very pragmatic. Due to the inconvenience I’m expecting a large portion (over 50%) of parents to not send their kids to school that day. Which I guess isn’t all that bad in the scheme of things as it’s highly unlikely there will be anything new taught on that day.. Unfortunately I imagine it making things considerably more inconvenient for teachers, for whom attendance is mandatory. It also kind of takes the fun out of the highly-anticipated last day of school.
I am not going to get into a big debate in regards to the merit of all these new holidays, but if I were to, my argument would probably start with the Cinco de Mayo oversight (the numbers bear me out). Instead I am going to offer a pragmatic solution: Recognition Week! That’s right, a whole week off to commemorate celebrate all of these holidays. When should it occur in the calendar? May I suggest the week of MLK’s Bday, circa mid-January-ish? At that point we are two weeks into the post New Year’s blahs, in the depths of cold bleak winter, and with MLK Day we would have a one-day head start in attacking any mandatory # of days requirement. Better yet, if we just make Recognition Week a NYC thing there will be plenty of heavily discounted hotel rooms from the Caribbean to Colorado. A week at the Aruba Hyltoniott Resort & Casino in mid-January, swapping a margarita for a pina colada (Microeconomics 101), that would make our ancestors proud!
Leave a Reply