The school board in Randolph Township in Morris County, New Jersey, voted 8-0 to remove all holiday names from the school calendar.
It sounds like the school board got all huffy because people had the nerve to get upset when they renamed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
Yes, who would have thought the fight started over Columbus Day. It’s always Columbus Day.
Board member Dorene Roche said, “If we don’t have anything on the calendar, we don’t have to have anyone [with] hurt feelings or anything like that.”
No Thanksgiving. No Rosh Hashanah. No Yom Kippur. I guess it also means no Martin Luther King Jr. Day, either. His birthday is just another “off day.”
“I don’t think really it is the board’s responsibility to be naming these holidays,” stated board member Ronald Conti. “Either take them off or just adopt whatever the federal and state governments are doing.”
The meeting had a “public comment period and discussion” but then quickly went to a vote. It confused those in attendance.
“What did you just do? What just happened?” shouted one man.
New Jersey has a large Italian American population. A lot of them had an issue with renaming Columbus Day because they felt like the board was trying to erase them. Remember, Italians, like my great-grandparents, faced a lot of discrimination when they arrived in the early 1900s.
The community is not thrilled the school board used their concerns to erase everyone:
“Don’t divide the town and divide our country and pit group against group,” Italian American One Voice Coalition executive board member Andre Dimino said.Members of the Italian-American community gathered in Randolph on Sunday, speaking out over the BOE’s recent decision to remove the names of all holidays from the school calendar.Instead, they’ll now simply be referred to as “days off.”“It’s really a disgrace. The fact that they removed all holidays is really an insult to everyone,” Dimino said.
The 2021-2022 calendar still lists the holidays.
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