To any student at a Brookline Public School, 180 is a magic number. By law, this is the required number of school days each year. The 180 days are split up by many breaks and days off for holidays—some federally mandated and others that the Brookline School Committee (BSC) has put in place.
Eid al-Fitr, known as the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” is a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. Recently, Muslim families asked the BSC to have Eid al-Fitr as a day off from school; this request was approved, and in the 2025-2026 school year, there will be a day off for Eid al-Fitr. This conversation prompted broader discussion surrounding what the school calendar will look like in future years, with debate over whether Eid al-Fitr and other non-mandated holidays should be recognized with a day off.
Background
The 2025-2026 calendar will include five non-federally mandated days off from school, which are designated as Category I holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Lunar New Year, Good Friday and Eid al-Fitr. A Category I holiday is designated as such if “Absences by staff and students impact the ability to conduct classes on this date or during this time. Designated as “days of low attendance,” students have a day off from school and teachers cannot assign homework due the following day.
During a Category II holiday, school is in session, but teachers cannot assign homework due for the next day. Eid al-Fitr, previously a Category II holiday, is the newest of the Category I holidays, officially added Jan. 9, 2025, in a vote by the BSC. Turning Eid al-Fitr into a Category I holiday raised the question of what should constitute a Category I holiday altogether.
At the BSC workshop on Aug. 8, 2024, members of the committee discussed the calendar. Superintendent Dr. Linus Guillory brought two drafts of the calendar which the BSC debated over. One remained the same, but the other includes two new Category I holidays.
At the BSC meeting on Oct. 10, 2024, committee members voted 6-1 in favor of seeing a revised calendar including one additional day off for Eid al-Fitr. In another meeting on Jan. 9, 2025, Dr. Guillory presented four calendars to the BSC. The first calendar made no changes to the 2024-2025 calendar, keeping Eid al-Fitr a Category II holiday. The second calendar added Eid al-Fitr as a Category I holiday. The third calendar kept Eid al-Fitr as a Category II holiday but put a teacher development day on Eid al-Fitr so there would be no school for students. And lastly, the fourth calendar included no Category I holidays, and it only designated federally mandated holidays as days off. Ultimately, BSC voted 6-2 (with one abstaining) to approve the second calendar. In the meeting, community members spoke in support of adding Eid al-Fitr as a Category I holiday.
Organizing the Calendar
The conversation about adding Eid al-Fitr as a Category I holiday became a broader conversation of how to organize the calendar. Some believe that adding more holidays has negative effects, as it will push school later into June which is not ideal for the staff, students or buildings. Others argue that one more Category I holiday wouldn’t be too much, and it is a way for Brookline to celebrate its diversity. Although the calendar that passed is the one including Eid al-Fitr as a Category I holiday, it is only for the 2025-2026 school year, and the calendar for 2026-2027 is still up in the air.
BSC member Carolyn Thall, who voted to have Eid al-Fitr as a Category I Holiday, said she believes her obligation as a BSC member is to ensure effective instruction and that adding more days off that extend the school year would not uphold that obligation. According to Thall, teachers, community members and building leaders have all expressed concern about the school year ending too late.
“I think we owe it to our students and our teachers to create a schedule that is primarily driven by supporting effective instruction,” Thall said in an interview with the Cypress. “There are many ways that the Public Schools of Brookline can and do acknowledge and celebrate our diversity and our many cultures and religions, but being closed for school doesn’t have to be one.”
BSC member Dr. Steven Ehrenberg was torn on the issue, but ultimately voted in favor of adding Eid al-Fitr as a Category I holiday.
“We already have an unfair and inequitably discriminatory way of putting religious holidays on our calendar. So the first option, the status quo, seems least fair to me,” Ehrenberg said. “The fourth option actually seemed very fair, but I don’t think our community really wants that right now. And if we’re going to do that, I think we have to study it, check it out with the community and see if there’s support for it.”
Ehrenberg said he supports a broad concept of education, meaning that learning is more than just what goes on in the classroom. He believes this rationale is worth considering in terms of keeping all Category I holidays and acknowledged that there are many parts to this discussion..
“I would probably stick with the current calendar rather than the no religious holidays calendar. But I think it’s a hard choice, but that’s just my position. I think people are all over the place in the school committee on this,” Ehrenberg said.
Thall said she thinks getting rid of all holidays is the fairest way of doing things, as then everyone is treated the same.
“I think the word equity isn’t super specific, but in terms of everybody being treated the same, in terms of their religious or cultural holidays, if the school district isn’t closed for any of them, then everybody is treated the same,” Thall said.
BSC Chair Dr. Andy Liu said while he would like to move towards a calendar like the fourth option, he believes that it is not something that should be put in place right now.
“I wouldn’t vote for putting that in immediately, because it would be too disruptive,” Liu said, “and it’s also something that might be hard to do if our surrounding districts don’t do it, because any day when we try to have school and many of our staff have childcare issues is going to be a pretty disruptive day.”
Criteria
In the debate over the calendar, many wondered what constitutes a “day of low attendance.” In the past, when designating new Category I holidays, the BSC did not provide data on attendance. Liu said that the criteria had not been clear enough, which was part of the issue in deciding whether Eid al-Fitr should be a Category I holiday.
“The criteria up to now have been pretty haphazard. It’s been a long-standing thing in Brookline that we closed for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. At some point decades ago, those were designated as ‘days of low attendance,’ although I’m not sure we really had any data to that effect,” Liu said. “And then, more recently, Lunar New Year also came in as a day of low attendance, again, not because we had any data showing that, but that was just how we labeled days that we wanted to have as holidays.”
BSC member Dr. Jesse Hefter said there should be a clear definition established for determining school closures. He believes that it makes sense to close schools if there are enough absences of staff and students.
“A definition for me would be, are there going to be enough people to run the school? And if not, then we probably don’t want to try to do it from an expense standpoint and from the extra burden that it places on working families,” Hefter said.
Lui said the most important data would be on staff availability. He echoed that if too many staff can’t come that day because of childcare issues or family responsibilities, then school can’t run.
At a BSC meeting, Valerie Frias said that Guillory reached out to the Brookline Educators Union with a survey to find out if staff could attend days of school for certain holidays. She said that the union refused to put that survey out but may be willing to do so in the future.
Hefter said he hopes a clearer policy, similar to the one on personal electronic devices, can be applied to how they decide holidays.
“I think we’re going to revisit it and try to understand, number one: are we maximizing teachable days? And number two: are we applying the measure of how, under what conditions we might have a school day of closure? Are we doing it fairly across the community?” Hefter said.
Hefter said that he thinks the BSC should try to involve the community to gain more perspectives on this topic. He said that it would be wise to provide the community with information and hear from a broader group.
“I think that at some point before the School Committee starts really taking it up in earnest, it might behoove us to canvas people or to provide people with an opportunity to let us hear what they think,” Hefter said. “What their logic is.”
