City takes steps to make Diwali a school holiday but advocates wait to celebrate
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Queens Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, Department of Education Chancellor David Banks and Mayor Eric Adams announced new legislation at the state level that would establish Diwali as a New York City public school holiday on Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022. Photo via the City of New York/Twitter
By Jacob Kaye
It didn’t come on the first day of his mayoral administration as previously promised, but Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday plans to establish Diwali as a New York City public school holiday.
Adams, Department of Education Chancellor David Banks and Queens Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar announced in Manhattan on Thursday that the Queens lawmaker this week introduced a bill in the state legislature to establish the holiday in the New York City schools’ calendar.
The legislation would swap one holiday with the other – eliminating Anniversary Day, otherwise known as Brooklyn-Queens Day, and adding Diwali, a holiday celebrated by members of the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain faiths, as well as a number of other members of the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities.
“Today, South Asian and Indo-Caribbean families like mine, all over the city have made incredible contributions, and today, I'm proud to say our time has come,” Rajkumar said.
The fight to establish the festival of lights as a New York City public school holiday is decades old, and more intense organizing around the issue has been underway for at least the past eight years. A bulk of the advocacy work has been in Queens, which is home to the largest South Asian population in the state.
There are approximately 200,000 school-aged children whose families celebrate the holiday in New York City.
“It's important, not only for the young people who celebrate and who honor Diwali, but it's important for all students,” Banks said. “When we talk about the education of New York City students, we have to recognize, the whole world lives here.”
“It is important that we honor and we recognize all of our young people,” he added. “The recognition of Diwali is yet another opportunity for us to begin to celebrate, to uplift and to honor those young people, their family, their faith, the celebration of light, the triumph of light over darkness.”
Prior to his election, Adams was asked by Richard David, a district leader in South Queens, whether or not he supported the effort to establish the day off from school. Adams responded by saying that once he was elected, he would take his oath of office and walk into City Hall and “sign it into a holiday.”
But once elected to office, the mayor found that establishing the holiday proved more difficult. The city’s DOE is required to give students at least 180 days of instruction, and the mayor didn’t immediately find a day to swap it with.
“We found a way to do it,” Adams said Thursday. “Chancellor Banks and his team sat down looked at the requirement of school days and instead of looking from a place of deficit we look for a place of surplus, and because of that we were able to identify a way of using legislation partnering with the assemblywoman to identify the days that we can use to have this important holiday – a Diwali holiday without our young people missing days of school in the process.”
Diwali is a multi-day festival that celebrates the power of light over darkness. The annual holiday generally falls during October or November and follows a lunar calendar. The centuries-old celebration originated in what is now India.
The mayor’s announcement comes two days before the start of the festival on Oct. 22. The festival’s largest celebration typically takes place on the third day of the holiday – that would be the day school children have off if the bill passes.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is one of several lawmakers to represent a portion of Queens’ South Asian population, called Thursday’s announcement an “important step.”
“South Asian children in NYC should see themselves reflected in our school system, and not have to choose between their faith and education,” the speaker said.
Should Rajkumar’s legislation pass into law, Brooklyn-Queens Day, a relatively obscure holiday that – outside of the schools’ closure – few celebrate, would officially be taken off the schools’ calendar.
Brooklyn-Queens Day, originally known as Anniversary Day, is a Protestant holiday that dates back to 1829. The holiday, which falls on the first Thursday in June, celebrates the founding of the first Protestant Sunday school on Long Island.
It didn’t become a school holiday until 1959, when the Queens Federation of Churches requested the state legislature take action. That year, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the legislation into law.
It was the establishment of Anniversary Day at the state level that necessitates the state’s involvement in creation of a Diwali school holiday, according to Rajkumar and Adams.
While advocates who have long pushed for the establishment of the holiday celebrated the announcement Thursday, they said they also felt conflicted and didn’t want to get their hopes up.
“Whenever the city punts to Albany, it's always a little unpredictable, and you don't really know what's going to happen there,” said David, who the mayor told he’d establish the holiday while on the campaign trail.
While campaigning for office, Adams suggested that there were other pathways toward establishing the holiday that didn’t involve the state, according to Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who said he’s celebrated Diwali “all of my life.”
There have been previous attempts to pass legislation establishing Diwali as a holiday at the state level, including a 2021 bill from Rajkumar that never made it out of committee.
“If it passes in Albany, it would obviously be historic and welcomed, but at the city level, by the mayor would be easier, faster and more predictable,” David said.
“Renewing his commitment is a very credible and an important thing for him to do because a lot of people voted for him and supported him because that was an explicit pledge that he made – and people believed him,” David added. “I believed him.”
Aminta Kilawan-Narine, the founder of South Queens Women’s March, said that as a child, she would spend the time before Diwali cleaning and preparing the house for Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess, as per the celebration’s traditions.
She said that after the cleaning and the subsequent celebration in the evenings, she would feel tired heading to school the following day.
“There needs to be a larger awareness of our festivals at a city level and I think that's why our local community’s advocacy, continued advocacy is so important,” Kilawan-Narine told the Eagle.
Both Kilawan-Narine and David said that in recent years, South Asian parents have begun to pull their children from school to celebrate the holiday in an act of protest.
“There are people in the community, and parents in particular who are just fed up,” Kilawan-Narine said. “The parents who would previously choose learning and education [over the promotion of their culture and traditions] are like, ‘Absolutely not, we're not going to be taken advantage of anymore.’ And that's fair.”
“We're at this point where we can't be ignored anymore,” she added.
Mamdani, who said that he would support efforts to pass the bill in the state legislature and would sign on as a co-sponsor should the bill move forward, said that he feels burned by the mayor and previous efforts to make Diwali a school holiday.
“I celebrate any additional progression towards Diwali becoming an official Department of Education holiday for all of our students across New York City, but I'm weary to celebrate the achievement before I actually see it in front of my eyes,” the Astoria lawmaker said.
“If I trusted the mayor by his words, then Diwali would have been made a school holiday on Jan. 1, because that is the promise that he made during his campaign,” Mamdani added. “So, I will wait to see the progression of this bill and then the enactment of the bill by the DOE before applauding any changes.”
Rajkumar’s bill has not been picked up by a lawmaker in the State Senate but a spokesperson for the Queens assemblymember said a number of lawmakers and leaders have expressed their support of the effort.
“The Assemblywoman has received broad support for a holiday and a community whose time for recognition has arrived in our city,” the spokesperson said.
