The largest school district in Virginia had a first by adopting a regulation that allows students one day per year off for attending “civic engagement activities.”
“I think we’re setting the stage for the rest of the nation with this,” Fairfax School Board member Ryan McElveen, who wrote the policy explained. “It’s a dawning of a new day in student activism, and school systems everywhere are going to have to be responsive to it,” The Washington Post reported.
The rule is set to begin on January 27, 2020. It allows students in 7th through 12th grades to have one day off per year for attending loosely defined political activities.
Students who want to make use of the rule will have to complete a form and submit it for approval at least two days in advance of their absence, and the student will have to check-in at school at least once on the day of the activity.
Fairfax Schools district, which is one of the biggest in the United States with approximately 188,000 students, created the rule to accommodate the growing need for time off among students since the resurgence of student protests after the Parkland shooting in Florida in 2018 and the climate change protests earlier this year.
The plan serves demonstrators involved in predominantly for left-leaning causes, such as climate change and gun control, critics say. A nearby school district in Maryland proposed a similar rule, but the plan was rescinded after an avalanche of mostly conservative protests.
Meira Levinson, a Harvard University professor who studies education, said, “Kids on the right who are active, they tend to be doing it by preparing to run for school board, or being aides in legislature.”
Thai Jones, a lecturer at Columbia University, who studies radical social movements told the Post, “People who call themselves conservatives probably do still count respecting authority—staying in school—as a crucial and central tenet of the social order.”
McElveen contends that the regulation may be advantageous to all students, no matter their political creed or color.
