Heather Curtis

WMAL.com

WASHINGTON — (WMAL) With a victory in Montgomery County Public Schools under their belt, members of the Equality for Eid Coalition are now taking their effort to close schools on the Muslim holiday Eid to Frederick County.

“I believe that Frederick County is violating the Constitution by favoring one religion over another by closing schools only for certain faiths,” said coalition leader Saqib Ali.

Since he doesn’t have legal standing to take the school system to court himself, Ali’s looking for a parent with a child in Frederick County Public Schools to file a lawsuit.

Rallying for the cause in Montgomery County led the school board there to vote to recognize Eid on Sept. 12 of 2016, which is a day schools were already going to be closed anyway for teacher development. Ali said they’ve already lobbied the Frederick County School Board and met with resistance, so now he’s taking the fight to court.

“I think at this point, this is the best strategy, and, you know, if things change, our strategy may change,” Ali said.

Montgomery County originally said Eid wasn’t recognized, in part, because Muslims don’t have a high rate of absenteeism on that day like Jewish kids do on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Ali wrote to FCPS to find out their absenteeism rates on holidays and was told they don’t keep track of that information.

While there is also no information about how many Muslim students attend schools in Frederick, Ali said numbers don’t matter because they weren’t used as a criteria for deciding to close schools on Christian or Jewish holidays.

While parents could choose to keep their children home for Eid without repercussions, Ali said students would fall behind if they stayed home while their classmates were in school.

A FCPS spokesman was not available to talk to WMAL for this story.

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