Petitions: Boo to school the day after Halloween
Who you gonna call when you don’t want to be in class the day after collecting enough candy for a longterm sugar binge? Change.org of course.
More than 200,000 people from school districts across Florida — and more than a million people nationwide — have signed online petitions calling for no school on the day after
Halloween, according to the petition-gathering website.
It’s not clear how many of those who signed petitions are students, but “a lot” would be a good guess.
“There’s nothing scary about the fact that over 2,000 kids and teens have come to Change.org to say that they want the school day after Halloween off,”
said Michael Jones, managing director of campaigns at Change.org.
“This is a major trend, and we hope schools listen and give students a treat. We encourage students to start their own petitions to make their voices heard in their own school districts.”
The most recent figures from change.org show more than 59,000 petitions have been submitted from Broward County Public Schools and more than 100,000 from Miami-Dade County Schools. There were two separate petitions for Palm Beach County Schools: one had over 8,000 signatures while the other had over 10,000.
And in Central Florida’s Orange County, petitions were submitted by more than 20,000 people.
It was not immediately clear if the petitions were reflective of a historic trend or more simply inspired by a desire to have a three-day weekend as, this year, Halloween
falls on Thursday. But the movement does come as school systems in South Florida debate schedules and days off from school for future academic years.
For example, earlier this year the Palm Beach County School Board debated whether or not to close schools for the 2020 primary election. And in Broward, parents and school officials have been discussing the possibility of giving students the day off for Eid al-Fitr — the last day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — as well as the possibility of closing schools for the entire week of Thanksgiving.
As for Halloween, there are also movements and debate elsewhere calling for it to be celebrated on the last Saturday in October rather than on Oct. 31 so that children could trick-or-treat later without school concerns and many parents would not have to go to work.
But purists oppose — saying it would be a blow to long-standing tradition.