On January 11, 2016, the Great Neck Chinese Association petitioned the Board of Education to formally recognize the Lunar New Year by declaring it a school holiday. At its February 25th meeting, the Delegate Assembly of the Great Neck Teachers Association voted unanimously to support this request.
Lunar New Year celebrates traditions dating back thousands of years and is a time to reunite with family. It is celebrated by millions of people worldwide, including a significant percentage of our Great Neck community. This fact alone provides ample reason to consider it a school holiday: our students should not have to choose between school attendance and observance of this important celebration.
There is a broader reason to recognize Lunar New Year, however. The Board of Education’s Statement of Educational Philosophy pledges that “[t]he staff, with the Board’s full cooperation, will strive to make it possible for each child...[to] achieve respect for individuals and their differences and for the relationships that exist on a personal, local, national and international level;....” Our public school community here in Great Neck provides our students with rich opportunities to experience firsthand a wide variety of cultures and customs. Adding Lunar New Year to the school calendar would signal the district’s recognition that this holiday, along with the other school holidays celebrated here, provides an opportunity to enrich ALL of its students, regardless of their cultural background.
We urge you to adopt Lunar New Year as a school holiday.
At its meeting on March 14, the Board of Education unanimously approved Lunar New Year as an official school holiday beginning in 2017. Read the story in Newsday.