Broward students to get ’21 Thanksgiving week

It’s still a few weeks away, but Broward parents are loving the weeklong Thanksgiving break offered by the school system this year and have voted in favor of doing it again in 2021.

The school district asked parents and staff to vote on a 2021-22 school calendar and received about 54,000 responses. About 70% chose the calendar with the weeklong Thanksgiving vacation, offered for the first time in the current school year.

The school board agreed on Tuesday to proceed with that calendar, which starts the school year on Aug. 18, 2021, and ends it on June 9, 2022.

The calendar also has a two-week winter break and weeklong spring break in March.

Palm Beach County schools approved a weeklong Thanksgiving break in 2017.

The Broward board also decided against offering May 13, 2021, as a day off for students in honor of the

Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the monthlong fast of Ramadan.

At a board meeting in October, Muslim students, teachers and parents shared stories of having to choose between school and their religion as the holiday approaches each year.

But the board learned on Tuesday that Advanced

Placement exams are scheduled that day to be taken by 3,000 Broward students, and decided they didn’t want to require them to make up these college-level tests on another day. “There is a testing conflict which is out of our control,” board member Rosalind Osgood said.

The Muslim Federation of South Florida estimates there are 76,800 Muslims and 26,500 Muslim students in Broward.

Board member Patricia Good said she wanted it to be clear to the Muslim community that the board had studied the conflict in detail.

“I don’t want the takeaway to be that we’re not sensitive to this issue,” she said.