001the faceless all right thank you good evening this is call the order of meeting um committee meeting of the ad hoc calendar committee uh this date is june 20th monday and the time is 5 36 pm um in attendance we have committee member erica castillo and myself and also we have board member john weldon chair of the board and board member joseph sokolovic and board member christine baptist perez meeting remotely and staff member uh superintendent michael testani okay and present with us we have uh attorney rebecca goldberg from merchant moses and staff attorney conrad valsing from kate thank you all for being here um so first what's up if we have a motion to approve the minutes um right i have no discussion on it no all right i'm all in favor hi hi all
002right but it's surpassed and the next item it mentions right in there that it qualifies for executive session that is we received a legal opinion from birth to moses about related to holidays and school calendar and by virtue of attorney attorney-client privilege we had to at least give it the opportunity to be discussed in executive session looking over it i see no reason why that's necessary do you feel any reason for that yeah okay so i would ask for a motion to waive the attorney-client privilege and discuss the uh the opinion in open forum yes okay second on favor hi hi okay so i'm just gonna ask um attorney goldberg to discuss the opinion with us you can kind of go through it how can you pass this down yeah thank you um just thank
003you all right uh good evening first of all i want to apologize i could not be there in person because i have been uh coughing and i did not want to create any difficulties for anyone and uh fair warning in case i start coughing while i'm discussing this um so i'll go through this in some level of detail um you know feel free to ask me to go into more or less detail as um as i'm going along um basically as you all know this matter came to um the board's attention through various um student-initiated efforts um related to wanting to bring um eid alpha which i'm just going to collectively call e but they're two different dates um as school holidays in the future um and i'm gonna pull out some of the reasons
004that they cited in support of their request because these will be considerations that we should look at in terms of how we think about requests for religious holidays to be added to the calendar i'm sorry can i interrupt for one minute yes i swear to let miss baptise perez know that i forwarded the opinion to her so she has it in her email sorry about that no problem so um one of the really um significant points that the students made and that will need to grapple with um is that when it comes to a day of religious observance even if you say okay we're not going to penalize you you can be out but you know no harm in your attendance and perhaps you know we won't give tests on that day nonetheless students and
005families have to make the difficult choice whether that student is going to go to school on that day and thus forgo some level of their religious observance or are they going to fall behind in class because no matter what they're missing instruction at that point um so that's really where a lot of the tension is and why these students are saying it's not sufficient to just say let's take the day as a no penalty day um the students also mentioned um you know i i don't know where these statistics um came from or how reliable they are but they stated that approximately one-ninth of the um students in the district are muslim um in support of that claim you know we're looking more generically at this point but we're going to talk about what to
006do with demographic information so i'm putting that out there um there's um in addition a concern that when students don't have their holidays recognized while other religious faiths do have their holidays recognized it causes students of that minority faith to feel othered um and so it's part of the diversity related initiatives of being truly inclusive to have those holidays obtain the status of a school closure um they note that when we're looking at data that's available to us right now in terms of student attendance it's really an incomplete picture because it shows what students did when they were faced with what many consider to be a very difficult or impossible choice not what they would do if the day were really um available to them to have off without any consequence in terms of falling
007behind in school work um they also noted that if a large number of students are absent on one day and school is moving forward that then when those students come back the instruction is necessarily going to have to catch them up which means other students are going to be sitting there through redundant instruction um and so in response to that this committee that we're here today with was created um in terms of the legal analysis which is what you're really asking me um for help with let me start with a few broad principles first of all there's a list of holidays in the connecticut general statutes generally speaking schools are not required to close for those legal holidays except for those occurring in january or december this is essentially making sure that um you have
008to close for that winter break um so then the question becomes okay well that's we have pretty broad um discretion to a certain extent um in terms of setting the calendar uh with that limited small limitation in mind what about um can we choose to close for a holiday when the reason we're doing it is because it's a religious holiday so the the general guiding principle is the first amendment of the u.s constitution connecticut constitution has some somewhat different language but it generally gets interpreted uh the same as the federal constitution so i'm really relying on the first amendment for this and um basically what the first amendment is telling us is that we can't have laws um that either created an establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion um so there's
009no uh us supreme court case that directly addresses foreclosures for religious holidays um there is a so the leading case for looking at any question under the establishment clause is a case called lemon versus kurtzman it's a seminal case from 1971 and it creates what's called the lemon test i should note that the lemon test is not the end-all be-all of um establishment clusters prudence but it is the simplest and best available mechanism for right now without getting into some very esoteric questions so the three-part analysis under the lemon test and what we should use to make our decisions is that whatever government action is being taken in this case the question of adding uh any given religious holiday to the calendar for closure purposes um we have to have a secular purpose now that
010secular purpose does not need to be the only purpose but there needs to be a secular purpose um secondly the principle or primary effect cannot be to advance or inhibit religion and that means a specific religion or just religion generically um and the third is that the action can't create what's known as excessive government entanglement with religion so where we're kind of monitoring what religions do um things like that um so when you try to apply it to cases about holidays um a good example is a case that i cited um in my memo from the ninth circuit called kamik versus wyfee um and it's really in that memo looking or i'm sorry in that case looking at whether the state of hawaii could maintain good friday as a state holiday now kind of important
011to keep in mind good friday is a christian holiday and that's a majority religion and what we're talking about is um minority religions and and that distinction will become important in a bit um so when the court looked at the first prong of the lemon test is there a secular purpose for the action they said yeah we're trying to find more days for people to have off i mean that sounds like what hawaii would want to find as their second purpose we want more days off right um and that could be the secular purpose i mean why they can't pick any other day didn't matter they just hey there's a secular purpose um and in particular the court referenced a u.s supreme court case from 1952 that i quoted for you a big block in
012the memo i'm not going to read it now but uh it it's a really important um quote because what it's demonstrating is that the government cannot be hostile to religion and it specifically says you know we can't make someone go to church or observe a religious holiday but the government can close its doors or suspend its operations as to those who want to repair to the religious sanctuary for worship or instruction so that quote i think is very applicable to what we are talking about here do we close schools so that people can go and observe the holiday that they wish to observe um so what this tells us in terms of that first prong of the lemon test is as long as we have a secular purpose any legitimate secular purpose um which can
013be the accommodation of religious minorities then we're okay so you can think about um and i'll get to some of the specifics later but some of the ideas like maintaining diversity and inclusion not forcing students to make really difficult choices not causing students to feel other can all um be a secular purpose for meeting the first prong of the lemon test saying we want islam to be the official religion of the bridgeport public schools would not be a secular purpose but that's of course not what anyone is trying to accomplish um when they're talking about holidays like good friday and christmas and thanksgiving they they some courts have said these have become secularized now that's obviously a matter of opinion and people will differ on whether you know christmas at this point is has somehow
014lost its meaning as a religious holiday or not but if you look at a holiday for a religious minority i think it's extremely difficult because the reason that any holiday has become secularized has tended to be because it's in the majority it's become mainstream things shut down it becomes a day of shopping or going to the beach or whatever um gets ends up getting associated with that if you're talking about eid or any other religious minority holiday i think it's very difficult to say oh you know that's that's just become it's a hallmark holiday now um so that's why i don't feel that we can ever go to that argument which did apply in that good friday case of saying this isn't even really a religious holiday anymore it's going to be a religious holiday
015the question is do we have a secular purpose for closing on it so that's that first prong the secular purpose the second prong is the primary effect is the primary effect going to somehow be [Music] creating um promoting a religion or religion in general um and you know so when you say oh well good friday creates a three-day weekend that's a secular purpose you're not going to really find that with eid because it again it has in you're not going to find that a religious holiday of a minority religion is very likely to have become so uh secularized however um in all these cases they really deal with situations where the majority is being accommodated while the minority religions are not being accommodated um so i think it would be very difficult to argue that
016we have holidays on the calendar from three four five religions let's say but somehow the bridgeport public schools goal is to promote any one of those religions or to say we're trying to promote religion in general you know the promoting religion in general cases are really more about like having a moment for silent prayer um so you're not promoting religion in general you're not promoting any particular religion i think it'd be very difficult to say that the goal here is to you know we really are we're very pro-islam we're very pro-whatever other minority religion you're talking about that's not what it's about it's about accommodating uh students who need to take off for their observance you don't really it wouldn't matter what religion it was so then you look at the third prong the excessive
017entanglement prong and it was very interesting because there was a connecticut supreme court case called griswald and it did find excessive entanglement in a good friday case but i think the ground for that is very shaky um griswold dealt with the ban of sale of alcohol on good friday and the court would be forced to monitor alcohol sales on good friday in order to determine if there was a problem so the way that they found that there was excessive entanglement is one well the state has to monitor it okay that one maybe but the second was well we wouldn't know what day good friday is without reference to ecclesiastical calendars i don't think that that's a very viable at least that second part is a very viable objection at this point um to say well
018if your holiday is on a gregorian calendar and it's consistent then we can accommodate it but if it's not consistent on a on a gregorian calendar we can't uh if you look at the fact that connecticut office the state of connecticut currently closes for good friday um it's not considered a legal holiday it has a slightly different status but as it stands connecticut office is closed on good friday so and how do we know the date with reference to ecclesiastical calendar so i don't think that that's going to be the problem here the fact that um many of these minority religions um use the lunar calendar then you know the dates will shift um with each year i don't think that that is really going to be a problem and you're not trying to monitor
019alcohol sales you're not doing anything other than closing um kamek that uh hawaii case said there is no such entanglement in hawaii's simple closure of state offices so i think and it was specifically differentiating the connecticut case so i don't see that excessive entanglement is the issue either um if that's the case then closing for any religious holiday would create excessive entanglement so therefore i looking at the lemon test you don't have any inherent barrier to closing for religious holidays because you can meet the lemon test as long as you adopt the right approach in terms of a secular purpose and you keep the discourse um in the board meetings and the reasons for the vote and and the any preferatory language and any kind of policies should be consistent with the secular purpose um
020and so i i gave you a road map in this memo um if you decide that you want to close for a religious holiday you must identify a secular purpose i don't believe that that secular purpose would ever stand on solid ground if you say well it's because the holiday became secularized if you're doing that for a minority um holiday possibly for a christian holiday unlikely for a non-christian holiday um i gave you some possible secular purposes that you could articulate um again it really goes to inclusivity the difficulty of advancing the curriculum when a meaningful number of students would be absent and as the third point remediating a situation that is unfair or perceived to be unfair by a large number of community members so um those would all be secular purposes that you
021could articulate um as i said please make sure that you're consistent in your discourse with that secular purpose a very complex piece of this though um is the question of well if we add this holiday what about other holidays and i think that when you're in a diverse district this is a very tricky question because the more minority religions you have if you have one minority religion it's easy to say okay you know there's enough people here it's twenty percent of our population we're going to close but what if you have five percent here five percent here five percent here and you have a lot of um smaller groups a more diverse district um you may end up with a situation where you just have too many closures you would be closing you know every
022week for a different uh religious holiday so at some point there has to be some kind of attempt to draw a line and we'll discuss a bit of that in a moment um a point that was made at the board meeting that i think bears significant consideration is that you know every decision has its consequences and one of those consequences is when you close school on a day that other people don't have off from work then the parents will need to take off work and file find child care or find child care at a cost to them right so if you close down for a religious holiday what do the parents of the children who don't observe that holiday need to do they need to take off work possibly without pay or they need to
023pay for child care and that can be a really significant cost especially in um a demographic where people are you know perhaps struggling to make ends meet and may not be able to take a day off work without pay without causing a significant hardship so that's really important to consider that while you may have all the wonderful intentions over here there is a cost over there that needs to be considered and accounted for um so when it comes to the situation of you have a diverse district um how do we decide where we draw the line so that we're not closing every other week um it seems that you need to look at something like absence rates and there was an attempt to do this at the board meeting and the data just did not
024show a clear pattern that would necessarily say okay we saw a major jump on this religious holiday um so what you need to do is consider how we can get some reliable information but it is important to know that even if you say we're going to create some kind of a threshold number you have a you have to consider the students who um belong to minority religions that are smaller than that cutoff whatever cutoff you come up with will still have the problem that was being described here they will still so if i belong to a religion that is shared by one percent of the student body you're not going to close school for me so what's going to happen i'm still going to feel othered i'm still going to have to decide whether to
025go to school to keep up with my class or whether to um to go to my religious services and so there is still someone's going to be having that problem it's a question of how many someone's um so just recognize the problem cannot be eliminated entirely so if you're going to close for anyone you want to have some kind of threshold i don't have the magic number for you i can't say it's 10 it's 20 it's 5 i think part of it is trying to understand the demographics of your district as best as you can so when you look at trying to obtain the data it's very difficult to do that the u.s census does not collect information on religion um you may have some other sources of data and if you do that's that's
026a great way to you know to try to get some of this information you shouldn't pull students directly um and so one possibility that i came up with as a a way to try to gather some meaningful information about the extent of disruption would be to take the holiday in question and identify the date it fell on in you know the previous school year and pull teachers say to them how many [Music] of your students were absent on this date and how many do you believe are attributable to the fact that it was a religious holiday and so if you have a student who is known to adhere to that religious faith who was absent on that day or said that they were absent for that reason then the teacher can indicate that and it
027gives you some information to try to disentangle the multiple causes of absences um it would not specifically identify who belongs to what faith you're not looking to cross-reference names of students you're looking for there were three kids out and i think they were out for this reason or i think two of them were out for this reason and then you also can ask them how and to what extent did this create a disruption for you if they say it was no problem you know i caught the kid up after school it was you know then you can take that into account if they say it was a significant problem you know i i couldn't teach because there were a lot of kids out it tells you something um and then when you're making your decision
028you're basing it on facts um and you also potentially need to be looking at employee absence rates as well although it is a bit easier i think to just say well you can take that day off that's just one of your personal days um so kind of you know zooming back out for a second it's murky in terms of the legal um analysis that applies to the establishment clause but i i do believe that if you want to do if you want to close for a religious holiday you can't i believe you can do so provided you go about it in the correct way um and then i i think in a diverse district you really have two options to consider either you set some kind of a threshold and you engage in some kind
029of data collection effort to try to [Music] figure out the extent of disruption and act on that or you take the approach that is admittedly not ideal for a lot of students and you say you know what we can't we can't close the school for religious holidays we're just we're not going to do it for any religious holiday but anybody who wishes to take a day off on one of their religious holidays can do so without penalty yes it would mean that they've made that difficult choice to attend or not to attend yes it means they have to catch up we acknowledge it's unfortunate but we can't find a way to do it without creating too many burdens for everyone and none of that would affect the christmas break because of the requirement that you
030be closed at that point available for questions i have a question um can you just detail to the best of your understanding a little more about the the lemon versus um yeah that case uh kurtzman yeah um so that case really what's notable about it is that it um it set it it set the tone for excuse me um for how to determine when the government is getting too involved in religion so it had to do um with a case about um the [Music] uh school funding for things like textbooks um teachers um um non-public school um for non-public school students and so the concern became like well if you're going to be paying for the textbooks you know are we too involved because now we're we're getting involved in the content of instruction in
031a non-public school so it doesn't have direct applicability to this kind of case which is why i kind of shifted gears and really focused in on that ninth circuit case the comic case but it the significance of it is setting the lemon test now there is definitely a sense that the lemon test itself is on shaky ground it is still technically the law of the land um and all the attack even if this test does go away in name the the court principles will exist just in some altered form and so i don't believe that any changes that may come to the lemon test in the next year or two um because it has been noted um by current supreme court to be on shaky ground uh i don't believe any of those changes would
032significantly alter the decision-making framework we're talking about okay thank you joe uh yes okay you know in our decision to approve eat alpha tears as a holiday did we meet the legal requirements of a secular purpose you know i think that's a very interesting question certainly what was articulated at the meeting um was that it was based on the perceived um the perception that a large number of students would be absent i recall that language in particular the perception so that is a secular purpose the question is whether it's founded well enough may articulate a bit for some of what you may have not have seen in the meeting the board received over 1 000 and changed petition signatures from members of the community for the day off the room was packed with about i
033don't want to over exaggerate at least at least 80 uh 80 community members is that a fair number yeah more or less and the committee the local mosque showed up and they showed up in numbers so so that that's articulate so when i'm talking about the number of people i'm referring to the number of people who would be affected specifically by the policy i there is certainly um unquestionably i did see at that meeting and i did see the the background materials on this there's certainly significant um community support for adding um id alpha tier as the holiday um if the reason there's significant community support is their religious um purposes i think it may become questionable that's why most of the time when this is done it gets linked to attendance um because you
034can have um very vocal people um supporting you know a policy for all sorts of reasons doesn't necessarily mean that if you enact a policy um because of that it will be on solid constitutional ground so i do believe the reason that was articulated um in the motion which was based on the perception that a large number of students would be accurate is a secular purpose the question that that i have at this time is whether it's actually factually accurate because we just don't and as there was significant discussion at the meeting there's a lot of reasons we are limited in how we can get that information right and and uh as well as the motion was the um it wasn't uh articulated within the motion itself was the otherness argument you've perceived yes which
035would would that be a better way to phrase it on the approval of the next holiday i mean i have a concern about that and i'll tell you why um so if you i'm going to make up numbers but if you say okay 10 of our student body would be absent on id alpha tier because they are muslim and observant and then you say you know um what one percent of our student body would be absent on another religious holiday let's say diwali so you and and you justify closing the schools on eid because you don't want to other the students who are muslim well haven't you just othered the students who observe the lesser observed holidays and then the ones who are part of the more the rarer um religious minorities or perhaps the
036ones who are most likely to feel other they may be the only ones in their class who are a member of that religion or perhaps the only one in their school who's a member of that religion so now we take a student who already feels like an outsider or different or no one really knows about their religion and we say well we don't want to other this group but we're silent about othering that group so i i would i would only do that if you are confident that your demographics are such that you you really have one or two meaningfully sized minorities and you don't have these smaller minorities one percent here one percent here one percent here so you don't risk othering them right yeah i i i agree a concept um that actually
037leads me into my next vein of thought is setting policy with any kind of parameters will have a disparate impact on protected groups i mean because we're not we're not going to have occasions we already got all our holidays christians got all the holidays so only one left to come for holidays and meet any parameters or policies that we pass are minorities so we're considering putting in place policies to make it harder for minority groups to get in effect minority groups to get a holiday off whereas i'm sorry do you need to interrupt yeah whereas other holidays that were approved with um most recently day after thanksgiving um good fridays and all these other holidays they did not have to go through any policies or procedures they just had to be approved by the board
038on the school calendar so my my concern is creating a policy creating something else that was not even thought of or heard of when we did all these other policies until the islamic community got their policy got their day off approved and a day off on the holiday and the perception to me is we can't let this happen again it's the effect of this committee and it's really concerning to me that we're even meeting here today on the day the state sales sales celebrates juneteenth and the schools are closed today and yet we're meeting to discuss preventing other people from getting a school holiday this is very chilling to me that's i'm sorry yeah i'll get off my soapbox yeah i think in terms of the goal um that your at least what i'm articulating
039is certainly not a path to how not to give someone um their holi you know their holiday off i think the difficulty is that what we're looking at is you know unless you're going to start um touching i mean you can't touch christmas anyway good friday is a question mark and some say it's secularized and the state recognizes it so let's put those two aside for a moment but what we're talking about is inherently about minority groups and then i think there's really kind of a distinction between what i'll call large minorities and small minorities right so the large minorities um we're talking about saying okay there's enough disruption to the learning process that we are we we have a secular purpose to close yet we you know again then then you you do still
040other those who belong to the small minorities right so then you your only option if you want to treat the large minorities and the small minorities differently is either so two options one closed for every single holiday that someone asks you to close for which is just not going to be tenable or take the approach of we don't close for any of these holidays and you it's a la carte you know you take your holiday and yes there's some burden to that but we we can't come up with another approach because of the issues we've described so it is a diff it's a very very difficult issue someone will always feel that they've lost out because unless you're closing for every single holiday then someone will feel that they've that they've lost out and that
041their religion is not being recognized that's all i have for right now well that the record show board member albert benahan has joined the meeting um do you have any miss baptist perez do you have any questions mr bennigan no no question okay well just decided you have anything you want to add to this conversation no thanks okay um i have some thoughts i want to share okay thank you um i just wanted to to say miss goldberg that you know i read this document in its entirety and i felt that it was um very uh clear and and as as well put together as it can possibly be considering all of the nuances i was uh pleased to see that a lot of the same concepts that we explored as a board without having
042this you know contextual knowledge um we did sort of go down a lot of these different avenues right without even knowing about the the lemon test or or about you know some of the cases that you've presented so i appreciate you know you having gone through doing the due diligence of supplementing some of our just sort of natural navigations um in having that conversation and i think the lemon test is you know although it does have um you know nuance to it it is sort of um as close as we possibly can get to having a model to structure the conversation around i i want to summarize that in this case with uh e um as as outlined in your road map i think ultimately we landed on um the first you know the first
043reason that you've shared here which says you know we decided to allow a school closure for eid for the promotion of inclusiveness of members of minority groups in advancing the district's commitment to educational equity and i feel that for the city of bridgeport that's something that ultimately was appropriate because we do come from such a diverse district you know in another district this might have turned out totally different you know but at the end of the day we're elected officials for the city of bridgeport and that's this is the community that we serve so i felt that um we sort of arrived at as at an appropriate um conclusion considering all the different you know avenues that we we discussed i think i guess the challenge going forward is whether or not we'll continue to
044exercise the same application of the lemon test for other you know communities that might might come forward with an expression of interest and having their um you know religions sort of acknowledged in the same way with a school closure so yeah that's i mean just really a summary of um of what you've said in your your your notes here but i just feel um that the board's analysis of the situation was pretty in alignment with what you've outlined here and so kudos to the board and having been able to you know arrive at a successful resolution on the matter obviously there's there's still some things that um remain in the in the um in the wing but i think this conversation has made it clear that there's really no way of perfecting this right so
045it's like no matter which way you go there's going to be some loose ends that are going to remain untied right i think i think that's right and i think that you know um as long as you um you know are continuously looking for you know how um how are we tying this to our secular purpose how does this fit in with our with our overall district objectives right our objectives are to instruct students our objectives are our equity um i would say those are probably the two major objectives um at play here and so you kind of have to keep going back to those as your guiding principles um you know so in terms of making that one-off decision um i you know subject to the piece about well we don't know how reliable
046the data actually are in real life it certainly um fits the lemon test the big question that remains um is where do you go from here um because it it works fine for one request and you have to see you know how diverse is your district how many and and what does that diversity mean in terms of requesting holidays off versus just being diverse so that actually brings me to my question you talked about the two extremes you know one is granting holidays to every single request which is untenable and the other is having no religious holidays aside from the winter break where it encompasses that possibly good friday so if it's if it's not going to be either one of those two what what would be you know your council on moving forward and
047being you know in in in the right vein with the law and so forth so i do think that saying that we are going to close for every holiday certainly untenable i think the option of we're not going to close for any holiday but you can take it all apart is not untenable it is something you could do but it would be to the disappointment of some people so that one i think remains on the table um in terms of the middle ground approach the middle ground is the one where you have to start looking at data because there's no way to judge between religions other than based on data otherwise what it's it's you know i like this one's holy book more than that one's holy book that's obviously what you're not allowed to
048do right so um the only rationale i can think of and that the you know the groups that have been through this have worked through is based on demographic information um you know perhaps there is a way that you can get a little bit more demographic information other than you know my suggestion um and i again i wish that there were census data it wouldn't necessarily tell you levels of observance but it would give you a good starting point um in terms of you know so then i think the roadmap is what i kind of laid out there about pulling teachers that's the you know that's the only way i can think of to without pulling people and saying hey what religion are you which obviously is problematic to find out about what's going on
049on the ground and in particular that's going to help you really crystallize the aspect of disruption you know were kids out were kids there but really upset that they were there you know the teachers are the ones who have the best access to that information we know from the board meeting and the numerous people who came out and spoke that that is a real problem for a number of students what we don't know is whether that is enough that you as a board would want to close down the entire school system for it um i will mention one other thing i don't think it applies to bridgeport in particular but i did see that for some of the really large districts like let's say the new york city public schools you know they might look
050at more of a micro level and close individual schools based on demographic information i just don't think bridgeport is big enough to justify that but i would just i'm mentioning it for the sake of putting it out there thank you um ms baptist perez hand up yeah uh i just have a question uh with regard i think i'm gonna answer my own question but you can confirm it the lemon test would also be applicable to the removal of holidays from the calendar correct uh it really applies to any government action um so i would say if you were removing a holiday from the calendar for the purpose of penalizing a religion let's say but okay but that would clearly i would say that would violate the lemon test right you know we don't we're this
051religion we don't like them anymore you know we're getting rid of their holidays but uh i think the the way i would like to look at it is about setting the calendar you know what what's on what's off and i i think that it needs to be based on contemporary information you know some of the holidays that are currently on the calendar maybe and this was referenced at the meeting as well may be based on demographics from 50 years ago that really have no applicability today um and so you know it might make sense to just say we're setting the calendar or new and here's what we're doing um i would prefer to frame it that way than to say we're removing a holiday from the calendar i mean that may be the end result
052but certainly the uh the public um message of we're removing a holiday from the calendar makes it sound like uh the religion has somehow fallen into his favor versus saying we you know we started fresh we made it based on contemporary information that we gathered in xyz manner and based on that information we um we're setting the calendar accordingly oh okay yeah no that was definitely something that was coming to my mind some of the outdated um demographics that were used to justify previous days off the school year may not be applicable now however the demographic that would be polled is different from the student population it would be actually based over the teacher population and would that lead into some kind of like labor or union issue that you can foresee in advance um
053i mean if you it depends how it's framed in the collective bargaining agreement because you get this specific day off that's going to certainly be an issue i think that um when you're looking at the different populations um you you know again you make sure it's a little bit easier i think with the teachers to or or um or staff to give them the day off without having to do a whole shutdown um because you you have the option of a substitute teacher you don't have the option of a substitute student um so they can take it as a personal day as long as you and remember that you have um title seven uh which requires that you make a reasonable accommodation um for someone's religious observance so you know they may not get that
054day with pay if there's no provision that makes that available to them if there's no personal days um available but um you would need to at least um as long as there's no undue hardship you would need to provide the reasonable accommodation so in that sense um you can you know you want when you want to take into account what's going on at the adult level as well not just the student level we've the focus to this point has been on the student level but i think as long as you preserve the ability for the staff member to take time off with or without pay that you've met your obligation there oh okay yeah uh just because i don't want it to seem like i'm pointing at something but i think one of the things
055we did taken to consider and it was mentioned take into consideration is holidays that may no longer be as popularly observed by teachers but that's still observed by the district um and there was a whole bunch of like um hypotheticals thrown out there but you know now knowing that that is something where we could accommodate and i was actually looking at the eeoc versus the abercrombie and stores regarding title seven and with that because it's a it's more of an employer employee-based cons uh case uh i wasn't necessarily thinking about like student calendars but also since this is a committee where uh potentially as long as we're doing it in in a secular purpose uh something where it could be considered that if it's not going to impact our teacher population as much but i
056haven't read the collective bargaining agreement um that some things may actually come off the table so thank you you're welcome i think that analysis is um is correct and that as long as you provide a reasonable accommodation to allow for the observance you're in compliance with the law in that respect however if you find that you know you have 50 teachers who are all going to be out then you might start looking at closing school okay any other questions well thank you very much this is very informative and it and as uh ms castillo said it it was very affirming to see that the way uh the board organically approached this seems to be in line with with the lemon test so i really appreciate your time tonight thank you thanks rebecca nice to see
057you good to see you mike all right i will sign off all right good night good night okay so the second and last item on the agenda is meeting talking with uh mr velsing staff attorney with cabe to discuss now in light of what we uh we learned tonight um and your experience with other districts and in this issue and uh forming the calendar especially trying to uh give deference to requests and potentially there could be a number of them um so as she explained we may not be able to approve all but then um so what has been some experience that you've had with this so far through studying policy hi guys happy to be here don't know how i'm gonna follow rebecca that was uh that was very in-depth um but i think
058your main issue here at least why i'm here is what are you actually going to do going forward you know i think rebecca did a really nice job with sort of the analysis of what happened but you know you guys still have the very real problem do we do this the same exact way going forward or do we set some kind of policy um so i have some talking points i'm also happy to do like a q a um but one of the things i'll just mention on something that rebecca said another way to sort of get the data without sort of burdening teachers may be to just compare absentee rates so like let's say if eid was on a friday this year you know compare the absence of staff and students on that friday
059to other fridays in that month and then you can make sort i mean it's an inference it's not hard objective data but you're sort of making an inference of how many more absentees we had because of that holiday that's the inference that it's because of that holiday so that's maybe one way to get some additional data i don't suggest it being the only data point in making these decisions um but it can be really helpful and something else i i do want to mention uh the board member who has the mask on uh sorry i did not catch his name um but he says yeah okay thank you so he had some great things to say about equality and that's incredibly super important but i do just want you to keep one thing in mind
060with this first amendment stuff and the lemon test that was sort of talked about a lot is that there's really two things at play here you have two questions when you're doing stuff like this the first question always is it's not about equality it's does our act in this case the policy on creating school closures around holidays does it violate the first amendment that's question one because if you get pulled into court that's going to be the end-all be-all there's not going to be a secondary issue of equality the first violation will be does it violate the first amendment the lemon test the establishment clause all that stuff that second question that the board member was mentioning about equality that is equally important but that's a secondary question that's more going to filter the legal
061options so you can't just make an illegal option because it's more equitable but if you do have you know rebecca's opinion about an option being legal under the lemon test and the establishment clause then you engage in the equality conversation that equality conversation doesn't really come into play with the first amendment it's not like title ix it's not like the 14th amendment with equal protection it's not what that clause is about it's really about does the state actor here a school district is it establishing religion in one way or another or of course um penalizing religion so just keep that in mind that's sort of background information so i'm going to talk a little bit more about what cabe has what cave doesn't have i'm not going to go through more legal analysis unless you
062ask me about what rebecca said i'm more than happy to drone on about legal stuff but i don't think that's why you want me here um so first question so i have some talking points i'm just going to go through them cave does not currently have a policy on deciding how and when to schedule a day off for a holiday there's probably two reasons why we don't currently have one and trust me we have hundreds if not thousands of sample policies it's not laziness you know if there's a need for a policy we will create one no matter what it's about we have the weirdest policies so i think there's two reasons we don't currently have one because this is not a new problem you know one thing i'll say is that brantford actually recently
063just went through this and they went with the nuclear option which is no holidays whatsoever for any religious holiday they did not enshrine that in a specific policy they had more a general policy about brantford being like a non-denominational non-religious district they didn't literally have a sentence that says brantford will not observe any religious holidays but it is what they're doing after having spoken to board members there and they actually acted on this so the nuclear option does exist in districts in connecticut and that is still on the table and again that's when you come to that second question does it fulfill our aspirations of equality and it does in a way you know it's nobody gets anything it's the nobody gets anything option you know but it passes that first test which is the
064establishment clause test that rebecca was going very into detail about you know so again two levels of questions here i urge you to keep in mind does it violate the first amendment and does it fulfill our aspirations of equality so that one i think is still on the table and other districts have done it recently um i'm not gonna sort of tell you which one to do and even rebecca can't you know attorneys you know the attorneys here at cave we're sort of like a legal reference desk we don't form attorney-client relationships but even rebecca who has formed an attorney-client relationship with you she can't tell you which one to do you know at the end of the day it's the client's decision to make their decision you know the attorney can strongly recommend and
065they can say hey if you do this guys it's illegal you know but at the end of the day there still is that secondary question that i think you as a board has to determine which is is it fulfilling our aspirations of equality and that's something neither rebecca nor i can answer you know we can help you with that first prong and maybe if you have questions about you know the equality thing of course we're always happy to have a chat um but really it's that first prong that we're kind of worried about right now but i think her legal analysis is spot-on there's almost nothing i'd agree i disagree with um in her legal opinion and that's rare for attorneys um but uh the one thing i'll say is that you know attorneys love
066citing cases but the thing is you know there's no real case in connecticut that weighs in on this school holiday thing so that's why you saw her pulling from the 9th circuit but again the ninth circuit doesn't bind us in connecticut in any way shape or form we don't have to do a single thing that that ninth circuit case said the one in connecticut that she referenced the griswold we are sort of bound by that but as she explained to you you know it's not about state holidays it's about sale of alcohol on a religious day so it's very rare that attorney is going to be like here is the exact answer because this has happened before the court so we are in a little bit of gray area about how these state holidays are
067sort of you know analyzed in connecticut to be quite honest so now what cave does have we have three policies that we are happy to forward you [Music] they don't deal with closures on religious holidays so we have two that deal with religious observances and displays but that's considering what is going on in the school during a holiday that is not about the protocol for deciding a school day should be closed which is really what i think at the heart of what you guys are getting at again i'm happy to forward it along to you there are some preambles in those policies honestly echoing what rebecca said a lot about you know religious uh establishment clause and first amendment stuff it's it's not going to be anything that wasn't in rebecca's opinion let me put
068it that way but i'll forward it along if you guys so choose because it does sort of let's say simplify it a little more um and then our second policy that i think is relevant to you guys is we have a school calendar policy but again it does not touch this subject it does not touch this religious holiday closure subject and again i think it's i think the two reasons we don't have the policy is that it is very legally complicated as rebecca just showed you not only because the first amendment is always difficult to interpret because there's a lot of gray area but because connecticut does not have a case on point it doesn't have that school closure case that we can point to and say yes this is okay and these are the
069reasons when it's okay we don't have that so the attorneys are just sort of grasping at analysis from other cases that aren't really on point and the second reason i think we don't have a sample is because i have no idea how we would create that threshold number that rebecca was sort of getting at as being sort of the real middle ground here which is we're going to create a non-arbitrary threshold for when we're going to give the green light to a school closure which i really think at the end of the day other than the nuclear option is probably the most solid way forward there's a third option but i'm almost hesitate hesitant to even say it because i honestly don't even think it would hold up in court but there are there are
070arguments for it which is you create a policy on non-objective factors which is basically like promoting cultural tolerance in the community i do not suggest that it is secular by definition but the thing is it is so arbitrary and unclear about what that means that a it's going to be challenged under just due process if somebody applies for a holiday and is denied but b it gets you into that scenario that rebecca was warning about where anybody of any religion can come to you and request the school holiday and you've sort of backed yourself into a corner where you have to grant it or you're going to get into all those problems under the 14th amendment in equal protection and all that stuff so i think it's so arbitrary as it doesn't really offer anything
071and then i think you'll just have 180 days closed each year because you know people can come for any religion at all or any sincerely held religious belief which is what a lot of the case law defines religions you know which is basically anything so those are the starting two points we don't have a policy on point for this we have three related policies which sort of get a lot of the language rebecca was just offering you maybe in a more easily digestible way but again it is not specifically what you're looking for as long as i understand what you're looking for um so my third point we are not we being cave we are not opposed to creating a custom single policy for a district um i need to talk a little bit more
072with our general patrice mccarthy i'm sure you all know her about whether we would even want to in this case because of that first issue i was talking about about why we don't even have a sample because it is just so difficult to really articulate a legally defensible policy about this that is also attuned to a district's need you know we would just be making up numbers you know whatever the district was trying to achieve um there's a sort of a secondary thing here which is you know you've already engaged rebecca at length to sort of lay out her hopes and fears about all this stuff you know if you really want somebody to craft this policy i would just have rebecca do it she's done 90 of the work you know i think the
073bigger choice here is just picking one of the three options you know and again the three options being the nuclear option no state holidays for any re i'm sorry no state holidays no religious holidays for any reason and other districts have done that and that's fine and i think it's actually pretty legally sound but again i'm not your board attorney ask rebecca but i'm pretty sure based on her presentation i think she would be okay with that um the second option which i think and it appears that rebecca thinks is the most sound approach going forward that's still equitable which is you have to determine some sort of numerical threshold for when you're gonna decide to create a school closure i mean that's really at the end of the day you know what i think
074it has to be and i think the data collection is the hardest part but i think a good start is you know i actually just thought of that idea when rebecca was speaking about comparing the absentee rates on a religious holiday to the other same day in that month you know i think you'll be able to create a pretty good inference there um i would still also do what rebecca says about sort of polling teachers about absentee rates in class um but again you just need to have that secular reason that's really sort of you know there's three prongs to the lemon test but honestly the first one's kind of the most important you just have to have that secular reason as a state actor for doing something and that's really sort of you know
075going to be 90 of the work um at least under the the lemon test um so having said all that you know do you have questions for me is there something you know is there something that you wanted cabe here for that i missed you know maybe maybe i misinterpreted the request you know i'm more than happy to do q a to sort of back and forth whatever you guys want okay uh miss casino um for clarity um because i i think i may have missed it but you said there there were sort of three options that we should maybe be considering right now one no religious holidays for any reason two determining a numerical threshold for deciding to create a school closure or three absenteeism yeah yep based on abs based on absenteeism and
076then your last option i missed it so that was school closures based on a subjective secular reasoning one being cultural tolerance in the community that's technically non-religious you know but i just think it does more harm than good i don't think it's a great option and of course at the end of the day run all these by your board attorney but i'm pretty sure the first two were sort of things she already talked about um but again like you always have to tie it back to a secular reason even if you get a petition of you know a thousand people of a specific denomination you still then have to tie that to a secular reason i.e absenteeism you know it can't just be like oh look we have a lot of people who want to
077observe eid and feel included you know that gets back to that entanglement with religion you know you have to tie it to you know this is something we use a lot in connecticut and i'm sure you've heard it a trillion times in all your other actions you everything you do as a board has to be related to the educational purpose of the state and one of those purposes cannot be religion so it doesn't matter how many people you have pouring their heart out to you about feeling excluded that's not what this religious test is this is not about equality this is really about not entangling government with religion so no matter what you do always tie it back to something you can articulate that is not religious in nature yeah i think ultimately um i
078will say both both of those instances happened when we had this conversation where you know they're like jose kolovich will tell you there was this you know outstanding show of support in the community and there was 80 people in the room well you know one person could look at that and say it it was this incredible show another person could look at that and say well 80 people in in a district of 30 000 is not an overwhelming show of support you know ultimately i think where we landed in terms of a secular cause to move forward with the decision for closure was the promotion of the inclusiveness of members of minority groups and event advancing the district's commitment to educational equity yes as long as that minority group is not minority religious groups at
079least in how you articulate it because the crazy thing about all this is that like you guys are trying to do the right thing you're trying to incorporate minority religions but unfortunately the first amendment does not let state actors like entangle themselves with religion even though you're technically doing something positive for the muslim community you know what i mean you just have to articulate it in a non-religious way and going forward i think you need some sort of threshold about how you're gonna you know establish that so let me ask you and i guess i i'd like to have uh the board's feedback on this but just for the sake of starting somewhere with this conversation you know um so to express their interest in and really wanting to get this done you know they
080started a petition and collected signatures and then of course there was the fact they the board or the community the community okay um and and it was uh you know religious affiliations organizations outside of the the school district it was the community you know and anyhow um so they collected signatures and um and that was a determining factor of support and then and then of course they showed up in person at the board meeting and they spoke in public comment and what have you and there is a limit to how many people can speak in public comment anyway so that's a limiting sort of uh determining factor so my question is would it be appropriate or do you feel that it would be a good starting point to maybe consider you know if in the
081future a minority organization wanted to um you know express interest that they collect you know let's say of the number so if there's 30 000 people in the school district is something somewhere around like 7 000 signatures in order to demonstrate that although it's a minority and and again the signatures don't necessarily have to be from people of that minority faith but rather seven thousand people in the school district that would support you know and and sign their signature in getting this added to the calendar that's gonna be interesting something you just said so the when you said about a thousand people signed the support for the eid thing that included muslims and non-muslims you know i think it was largely muslims i i really don't think i mean and i don't know it was
082definitely overwhelming majority muslim yeah yeah yeah because again you always have to i mean i just think you have to tie it back to the most common thing is just absenteeism you know just that's the hardest data point hardest not in terms of difficult but hardest in terms of concrete data point that school boards can get to determine that there's going to be a rate of absence in the future or a historical rate of absence you know like that's why jewish holidays are really common because there used to be like more representation in certain districts decades ago you know it just became such an actual logistical problem with staff and subs and makeup assignments and grading makeup assignments you know that it just became a logistical secular problem to have school open on certain holidays
083so i think really absenteeism is the go-to data point and the problem is if you have a petition with a thousand signatures and let's say you know a hundred don't have kids a hundred are christian a hundred are jewish a hundred our grandparents whose kids are too old you know a hundred don't work in the schools you know what data are you really having represented to the board it's not absenteeism data anymore it's community sentiment you know so i really think the data point has to come from within the disk uh not the district from within sort of the board and the administration and stuff like that um again you know i'm i'm speaking a little more candidly than probably rebecca can because you're you're not my clients you know so i hope you feel
084free to ask me sort of a little more casual questions than you would ask rebecca but at the end of the day you know anything i say you have to run by rebecca you don't have to but you can't take it from me as if i'm your attorney you know if you have a legal question you'll run it by rebecca right okay so you know just be aware of my conversation in this matter you know when i say something is like not defensible maybe rebecca thinks it's it's defensible and then you guys can go ahead and you know go nuts with it you know but i just think having a threshold of community signatures has sort of that logical problem that i just presented but again maybe rebecca's totally fine then it doesn't matter what
085the heck i say okay thank you so i i have a question about this but also christina yeah i think thank you um but not in terms of religious holidays any request you know for any reason if there's a a group that's growing and would like to be recognized you know for example there could be something for pride month or something like that it could be anything it could be anything um where is there is there any any standard for preventing discrimination and saying so let's say it wasn't for religious reasons so we weren't worried about the first amendment we're we're worried about the table just in general as a board makes policies to open up or close close i should say close the day of school to open it up to a particular group
086religious or not is there any you know would that be the same thing again thresholds and standards or is there anything that already exists now for distinguishing between one request and another i mean yes there are laws but each act sort of falls under a different law you know like if you have sports you know that's going to be mainly you know a lot of title 9 stuff where you have to have equal opportunity for like men and women and now there's a transgender aspect to that and how that weaves into how title nine already exists you know i think it really honestly depends on the act you're talking about like i can't give some general statement about when minority groups even of a non-religious nature you know how they are to be dealt with
087in a given scenario like it really depends on the scenario honestly like it's it depends the worst attorney answer in the history of the world so i would imagine that that same idea of having an attendance threshold could be applied either with secular or non-secular requests if there was such a such a threshold stated i don't think i don't think it should be one for religious requests and one for non-religious requests either way they're a minority group requesting something because i i just imagine that this isn't ending right here this is and this isn't ending this year five years ten years it will change as we talked about some previous holidays that may not be as relevant now this in general if a request comes to whatever board is here it has to be dealt
088with and and i think it should be treated the same if it's religious or non-religious it should be some type of standard that that's my opinion yeah can i can i sort of i mean sorry i didn't know if you were done um so again one of the really difficult things to sort of internalize here is that you know sometimes law can be cold and i mean that in sort of what i opened with when i said there's really two questions here does our act violate the first amendment and then does it promote equality because the thing is when you're talking about equal protection even if you have just one female student or one transgender student you know the law is equal protection the law is not a school cannot promote gender or sex you
089know i mean we're talking about two completely different barriers here which is why like i would beg you to not sort of compare lgbtq stuff with this religion stuff because it religion is such a unique difficult topic and it has its own specific law that establishment clause of the first amendment which says governments and state actors cannot establish religion it is different than the 14th amendment in title ix which is government has to establish equality among certain gender groups you know what i mean like it's like a different mindset it's it's it's very i would say annoying because again what you're trying to do is you're trying to promote this equality among religious you know you're trying to do the right thing at the end of the day but there is just this legal barrier
090that prevents you from doing certain things which is the establishment clause of the first amendment so i hope that answers your question a little better which is we're just trying to ask a different legal question we're not asking about equality we're asking about establishing a religious sort of motive i guess is the best way to explain it yeah i i appreciate that and i i think that you know this this came up specifically because of the request for eid for the muslim holiday but it it is in general i think about policies if any for granting holidays as well as just also looking at the calendar as a whole which has nothing to do with practicalities but where things belong and don't belong but so you know tonight's conversation of course kicked off by rebecca
091specifically about religious holidays but the reason why i brought up what i did is because i think that you know you can't can't just if we do anything you can't just stop there you have to think about how to be inclusive and realistic as requests come other than being closed 180 days i see so maybe you're trying to segue to saying like what if people want off for pride day is right a possible inference of what you're saying or or st patrick's day or uh or or i don't know what you know i mean i don't know enough about st patrick's day to know if it's religious or not but it oh i don't think so it's definitely secular but if we stick with the pride day you know again you're not bound by the
092establishment clause because as far as i know lgbtq is not really derived from some religious basis you know you're just not bound by the same questions honestly right okay thank you miss preptis perez oh thank you i just have a general question regarding more cape services because to be quite frank our district fails on collecting sufficient data with data points and so this is something we barely have public attendance at our public meetings our regular meetings so actually getting bodies to our meetings is it is a point where um there's not a lot of people at our board meetings for whatever reason there may be and so with our district having 20 000 students uh normally when there's a loud outcry of of support and information that does come through especially from people within it
093and one of the things i tried to hone in on when evaluating was the change in the demographics to bridgeport within support with some of the city's own initiatives with the state of obtaining refugees from afghanistan so we are there's already data available to a change in demographic of people coming in from a particular background supported by the city and the state so to show a change in demographics because you're we can't collect that via survey and so it's really hard so finding uh that kind of information really stuck to us but like in a district in general that has a hard time with collecting sufficient data and another this is tangent but an example nevertheless it's like we couldn't get 10 percent not even 10 of parents to answer on a coveted mass survey
094so what what services does cave offer so that we can actually become a better district because i'll be blunt as well like as an elected official in a city with over 150 000 people not even two percent came out and voted in that election so with a somewhat elected but not by an over populist uh amount of the population how do we get that data what what could be done because when people talk it does attract our ears because normally it's in silence to know what's exactly going on so uh really knowing what to collect because it's hard to see the establishing the threshold and this is this was my logic with eid was i followed the paper trail from the city and the state and so i was i was able to see with
095my research that the demographics demographics were changing and in support and when we have our entire board meeting which is normally empty packed to capacity with people outside that's also saying something as well um so i guess what can be done so we can actually collect data because if that's that's not provided and and i hear the suggestion but in reality i i i don't see it happening so rebecca had the one suggestion which was asking teachers point blank how many absences they had in a given class on a holiday um and then the inference being you know they're probably absent at least a portion of them were absent because of the holiday and then she had sort of a secondary inquiry which was like the students who were there did they seem upset they
096were there i mean i don't know how you're going to get a teacher to answer that or how they're going to answer that or you know that seems like a strange question to ask anyway um but i think the other thing i mentioned would be really helpful is just you know look at your absentee rates of students and teachers on the holiday and compare it to other similar dates i mean i just can't think of any other way to do it honestly and no district has asked me to come up with a way we don't have a policy on it i haven't seen a policy in another district on this um you know if you guys are really starting to think about that as a viable option you know engage rebecca to look or i
097can look a little bit rebecca and i can divide the state you know in half or something we can try to find something for you guys but i don't even know the district that has set a threshold that i can say like here this is what stamford is doing or this is what is hartford is doing you know because they don't they don't have that number you know because i think a lot of the religious holidays you know are probably a little older like they were baked in you know at a time when you know this first amendment stuff ah how do i put this that some of the more minority religious holidays weren't under as much sort of scrutiny you know as probably muslim holidays are you know so i completely sympathize with the
098lack of data you know those are the two suggestions i would offer on getting data um you know it just really has to be in the schools i think the community demographics would be helpful but again i don't know how you get that data it's not on ed's site you know if you guys know what that website is um like i i mean those are the only two things i can come up with you know again the community polling i think it's a good supportive document i don't know if it can be the sole basis of like school closure you know because of what i was saying about how it doesn't really tie back to the schools directly you know unless you phrase the survey in a certain way of like will you miss school
099on these holidays but then again you're like i think the district is getting too intertwined with religion i mean if outside groups want to do that maybe you know what uh conrad actually we did receive several hundred of hundreds of emails and i mean i don't have i didn't have the time but to filter through it all but the majority that i looked through one of the things i did look at first is do they have a bridgeport address and then you can easily tell like is it a resident or constituent and and i mean even with that information i mean not being able to filter and process it names started to sound familiar there's kids in the district so without us soliciting responses we were able to hear parents of children in the district
100um i just think somebody on your admin staff in the schools has to take that qualitative data and make it quantitative they have to sort of tie it to some sort of number you know because i don't know what you put in a policy that makes it legally sound unless you're talking about some sort of numerical threshold which is i'm pretty sure what rebecca is suggesting you know and i think it's honestly a good suggestion because the other stuff is just way too nebulous i guess the the issue with um with resorting to absences is that we're we already know that we're dealing with a minority population so say the students or the teachers go ahead in the next year and they they survey that or you know in two years whatever however many years
101we determine is necessary to make the decision and and and the results are that it's a really small my north which is what the expectation is is that it's we're talking about a minority religious group and one can assume that the the data is going to result in a very small number of students in respect to the district right so i mean why bother then to go through the the you know um through the the the effort that the big effort of putting that burden on the teachers and trying to figure out you know from an administrative perspective what the processes are going to be to implement all this and that to arrive at something that we could have figured from right here i mean it's not how do i say this in a diplomatic
102way it's not about sort of you need to articulate the non-religious reason right and the best way to support that is with data it's not about you know bridgeport will go bankrupt and all our schools will close if these muslim students can't you know if these muslim students can't show up to school on eid and it's a real school day that's not really the question we're asking it's it's not what is the threshold that is going to destroy bridgeport logistically it's really just when do we feel as a board that it makes it impractical to hold school because of absenteeism so it doesn't mean you need a majority religion it doesn't mean you need 51 percent because okay there we've triggered you know everybody's going to be out it doesn't need to be that severe
103it just needs to be you know what this is kind of impractical you know this is too much absenteeism and again a good comparative especially if you have to articulate this to like a court filing one day is compare the absenteeism rate on that holiday to a non-holiday and then say look we had to deal with greater absenteeism this right here is your non-religious purpose we had increased absenteeism because of this holiday and it made having school impractical because of staff or students you know it was too much of a burden on our district because we had this increase i see so no matter if it's 90 muslim or one percent muslim you're going to have an increase in absenteeism you're gonna have the non-religious argument right there no matter what but the thing is
104if you set that threshold so low let's say point three percent in order to get a school closure day for whatever holiday diwali you know sukkot idofitier paganism you know whatever as soon as you hit that 0.3 threshold you have to cancel school you know so you need to set the threshold high enough to sort of not cancel 180 days but you need to set it low enough where you want to engage that secondary question which is equality so it's really extremely complicated and i cannot empathize enough with you guys you know we can talk about this honestly for the next five hours you know you can call me tomorrow and we can talk about it again you know it's a difficult decision and i wish i had a policy i can just show you
105guys like i can 99 of the time and say oh yeah here's what these guys are doing you know i just can't do that you know and i'm pretty sure rebecca can't either that's why she's looking at hawaii ninth circuit cases you know to try to help you guys make a decision i mean i don't know like we're not bound by the ninth circuit we don't have to do a single thing in that case you know and then the other case is about like alcohol sales like what does that have to do with you know school closures you know it's it's a very weird area to be in um i think those are your three options though that you repeated back to me again the third one is a distant third um the one about
106the non-objective non-numerical basis that's non-religious um i really just think it comes down to the nuclear option and then that some sort of numerical basis yeah until i'll give you one second so what about the option of just doing nothing like no policy you guys created eid as a holiday and just and every time a request comes we just willy-nilly either say no to somebody or yes to somebody no willy-nilly sounds sounds very yeah no no no i get it in other words like i'm not getting at least five requests in a row one after the other we say yes yes yes and now we can't say yes anymore and we don't have a reason to stand on laid to stand on why we're not saying yes other than there's no room in our calendar
107like what about that option i mean at the end of the day you can do whatever you want but i really feel like that sixth person who comes to you is gonna sue you if you say no right and i think that's the reason why we're here yeah and you're gonna be paying rebecca a lot more than whatever you've already paid here okay good job yes i think the reason that there's no policy okay a couple of things i i didn't look around for policies throughout connecticut i did find one which was one of the reasons we saw that it was for basically a denial of the holiday and just recognition on a calendar now i think it's this policy shows me that it's just a mistake to rely on attendance only in deciding whether
108it has such a disruption to the school environment because this policy states something uh another board member brought up as an argument that we could have school and not have any major tests or major lessons on that day that's a disruption to 19 000 students in the city of bridgeport to accommodate the few rather than have everybody off it's less disruptive to have everybody off and everybody be on the same page rather than have the 70 or ninety percent or whatever the number is of students who don't celebrate the high school in school learning nothing of significance to allow the five percent or ten percent to be off yeah or because that was really important what you just said and i'm actually incredibly impressed that you even found that policy so that is a separate
109policy that is a policy about holding school on a religious holiday and what the schools can do during that holiday and districts do have policies that say hey we don't offer tests on the friday before yom kippur but guess what that's tied to it's tied to a historical absenteeism rate based on the jewish demographics of the district so if somebody sued them for that policy and says you know some non-lawyer looks at that and says hey i think this violates the first you know the first amendment they will likely still i mean i don't know because we're just talking theoretically but they will likely have a non-religious reason for why they imposed that in the first place right which is the sec that leads to non-secular reason being something that other than absenteeism to measure
110impact on the school day and the school instruction which would also support us for the opposite of closing with only five or six or seven whatever percent structure which i'm against uh mr lumbar brought up doing nothing kind of stole my thunder there but he did it a little uh offhandedly but let's see i don't know we've a little narrative we're going to talk about a holiday i guess we're going to talk about the holiday that we reject as a boy well offhandedly okay um not to offend anybody except steinfeld fans we're going to talk about festivus all right comes off the same the same way this one started was a student-driven agenda item a student comes to the board and says i want festivus off we need to confess if it's off so we're
111fair to everybody is that student going to have 10 15 students to come behind and give us reasons and be able to properly articulate why festivus should be a day off that student or will that group be able to eventually come up with a thousand petition signatures to get festivals off will they be able to articulate uh secular reasons such as having to pause tests and instruction or have absentee rates to give that day off no they're not going to pass those thresholds and those are thresholds that we as a board just passed and focused on and we just passed i don't think we were to pass festivities i don't think if one person came up and had festivus one person came to the microphone and asked the festivus off that it would be approved
112and we would not be in trouble for disallowing that holiday we are empowered to approve the holiday we are empowered to set the calendar as a board that is one of our that's one of our few powers other than hiring the superintendent and evaluating the superintendent and setting the budget setting the school calendar is one of our only powers that we have now they didn't have to rewrite the constitution or add an amendment for the federal government to add a holiday it's left to their powers the state of connecticut did not need additional laws or procedures to stop them from adding a holiday i don't think we need any new policy i think doing nothing is probably the best since it seems what the majority of the districts across the country have done do we
113know of any um focus on just the schools that are proven eat have they had i mean new york city's done it for a while they did eat and um diwali and i think there's one of the districts in connecticut that did eat and diwali as well and a couple of more that eat have their doors been beat down by all these i mean we're we're creating solutions for something that's not a problem yeah and we already have we already have a mechanism in place which we use pretty effectively yeah i mean that i mean yes period i mean it's fine again you can do whatever you want at the end of it it doesn't matter what i say or what rebecca says you know and a lot of boards do go forward without this
114policy you know i just think you know your good hearts got you into some gray area and of course there's always i guess the fourth option of just doing nothing and living your lives and then if and when this comes up maybe it's in 10 years maybe it's next week you know i don't know but then how you go about that process i mean i don't know if you feel you do a similarly good job if you feel you did a good job this time you know you're just you're good to go you know you voted and discussed in public and you didn't violate the first amendment you know you know it's just a a board can be sued at any time for any reason a person doesn't have to be right to file a
115lawsuit that's what the courts are for you know having a policy in place doesn't prevent you guys from being sued i think what rebecca is really more thinking about is just if you guys are soon then we have to start talking about the lemon test blah blah blah blah blah blah you know but of course there's a fourth option just do nothing we say goodbye and you know you guys email me and call me with all your other problems yeah or um alternatively just set a policy because uh policies as we know we could be we could overturn a policy with two-thirds vote anyway so if it's problematic of saying we put 20 and 19 all this once let's just go past it two-thirds of the board say okay then the politics move i think
116if as i'm against the policy anyway if there's any policy proposed that that policy should just incorporate a legal parameter such as any holiday added to the bridgeport public school calendars must have a secular purpose or secular reason just so we're always away and cognizant that there needs to be a secular purpose yeah that's that's great and i mean it would be another data point of evidence if and when you guys are sued you know the same way that all the evidence of what you guys just did with the last holiday you know a policy doesn't prevent you guys from being sued it helps you guys as long as you follow the policy but there's also sort of a double-edged sword is that if you violate the policy you know it's also sort of clear
117evidence for the other side you're like hey this is the policy that they didn't follow you know so there is sort of a double-edged sword to a policy in that sense especially if you don't see this coming up a lot you know but if you see this i mean there's no way to really have foresight with this issue but if this is a common thing going forward that's when policy really helps because the more common something is the more likely you're going to upset somebody who will then engage some sort of you know action against the board but at the end of the day of course there is always that fourth option of just do nothing and you know live your lives but again i would run that one by rebecca as well i i
118just want to add that the other side of the coin is that the policy could actually help the minority group it could actually help them as opposed to some board members saying nope you're not getting that day but if they fit within that anyway and like you said you can always overturn a policy but then it's like well maybe these these board members have a certain bent in a certain direction that doesn't matter because it fits you know so it's not only the one side of the coin not only that that and it's not necessarily at all that side of the coin that it hurts the groups it could actually serve to help just want to put that on the table as well yeah of course yeah also if i could add to what mr
119lombard is saying i feel that you know with bridgeport being the the largest school district in the state if there's anyone that should be setting the precedent about how this goes in the state it should be bridge form right i mean we have such a unique circumstance in terms of the diversity that's in our district uh in terms of the size and the population of the district you know and um and and i do foresee that the possibility that if if it's going to come up again it'll probably come up in bridgeport or in new haven or in hartford but i mean bridgeport being obviously at the top of the list so why i mean the whole purpose of this committee being formed was to be proactive in creating a policy that addresses it so
120to walk away from this committee defaulting to let's not do anything you know feels a little like you know it just feels like a missed opportunity to really um make an impact and do something that um that we that we can live with it's like this is why we're having these conversations what we're learning today is that there is no perfect way to do this so we're not going to aim for perfection as board members we shouldn't then you know go off the deep end you know um you know concerning ourselves with the details of the specifics of this that and the other if we if we acknowledge that there there's just no way that we're ever going to arrive at perfection but you know what can we do to make it applicable and and
121have a threshold for our district make it work for our community you know um let me ask you is there another data point that you think that we can possibly defer to as an athleticism yeah like would you say that um you know overwhelming community support could be something that we could defer to i think that again gets you into the gray third option which is subjective reasoning because again it's community sentiment it's community tolerance it's community equity but it's not directly tied to the operation of the schools the educational mission okay so that's why i i mean if i think of something brilliant you know i'll happily email one of you guys but i just can't think of anything other than absenteeism you know you can put that question out to rebecca just like
122what other number can you imagine yeah that would get us to where we want to be i just can't think of anything i mean can you guys think of anything i can't i don't know well i mean in all fairness when we did have this conversation we came up with the same idea which was absenteeism and we we brought those numbers to the table and it turned out that there wasn't any major sort of distinctions between this day or that day and i believe the superintendent had had like you know just randomly picked certain days and i mean we tried to look at that data a number of different ways and arrived kind of nowhere you know but again even one percent increase is an increase in absence if there's zero then i think you
123guys are kind of out of luck i mean because then there is absolutely no absenteeism in any way shape or form that's just a fake answer so actually in one in one case there was a decrease in absenteeism but that's not what i want to mention so one of the things i think is that and you kind of alluded to one year two years out you know like is that not rushing into things i feel like you also mentioned uh uh conrad that well if you say 50 then everyone's going to be out that day just to make it happen you know so you don't want to have a crazy high number but but i do think that that has that there's some there's some relevance to what you're saying i think that the community
124support is an important element and as far as a data point i think that is in fact i think that could be measured by the following year's absentee re because if you have um com you know comrades christians and jews and buddhists who say you know what we want to support our muslim community or whatever the community is and they say therefore we're going to take this day off we're all going to recognize it and all of a sudden you've got a two percent increase there's your two percent or three percent you know so i think that the numbers should be low i don't know if it's five percent or temperatures whatever it is but i don't think it should be based on historical data because people may not have taken the day off even
125even the people of that religious uh affiliation might not have taken day off so it's not really because they didn't know they could and then the next year when they know it it it there's it means something here it makes a difference that in my when i was thinking this all along i'd like to look at the following year still saying it's optional you could you know you were having school whatever but measure that and say oh look at this it's it's the data of the absenteeism but it's also probably community support because one of the things that happened was during the meeting uh student ambassadors spoke up who were not muslim and were very strongly in support of it and one of them even mentioned i'd take the day off like not just to
126have a free day off and go play video games but to support this group sort of like a civil rights movement right and i think that's that's that's kind of what we were experiencing in making the decision based on like fear of future absenteeism well no i know that the fear was an element but i'm saying that it could be a data point in other words it could affect the same data point of absenteeism so not another not another thing that we're measuring but it but that measure is of something that's more relevant because it's it's i agree with you 100 i don't know if that could be like the soul supporting data point it might you know again we're all just making stuff up right now because there's no case on point well there
127would be no it would just be the absentees it would just be that rate yeah that would be it but it's giving it an opportunity to be to be you know a little more organic or not i think the historical absenteeism is more just tied to the very practical reality of the board acts most of the time based on like previous occurrences you know you you can act on future fear of absenteeism that a community petition may generate you know like oh look we're going to have 10 absence because all of these non-muslim right but what i'm saying is not to act but to wait not have to make a decision in that moment but to give it an opportunity so you have you can act on the next year's data are you speaking more
128this is what we're going to do or this is what we want to write in policy that's a good question can i say what i think yeah sorry okay well i'm talking with them i understand okay i'm having an interpreter okay all right so we're gonna let uh uh chairman weldon speak okay but i think what mr lombard is saying is if we established um all religious holidays as being ones which could be observed but that did not close the school system that enough people enough students would take the day off whether they were were not jewish or were not muslim or whatever and in that respect the absentee rate um just by again by showing there's that what you're saying because because as it is now we don't have any holidays where you can
129just take the day off right they're all just crawling you're either everybody's in or because they're all observed uh with the closure of school but if you just said okay we're going to reset the calendar and give everybody the ability to take that day off without penalty and then you know let's say you had you know a two percent absentee um on yom kippur you didn't have that information before because the school system was closed so you had no idea who would or would not show but if you established it this way as a test like you said as looking forward now that tells you something but you're never going to know if that full absenteeism was fully jewish people or jewish people with other non-jews who who just wanted to be in support but
130it's going to give you a number yeah and it's going to give you a number of people that are are still affecting the learning in the classroom or you know the way the district is performing on that except i request i'll talk about memory clubs you know for moving forward and then we're going to say we're going to look at it so we have you know something to look forward to we'll see how it affects it going forward because if there's a lot of support for festivus whether or not they're seinfeld's fans they might say i'm going to support you and your festivals and take the day off too because i think that's one of the things we were we were affected by was community support yeah and the catholic bishop the jewish organization the
131the the protestant groups where there's a lot of community support for granting this holiday and i and but yet historical data did not justify it one way or the other was not there at all and so it was like really based on that and i think that's a real data point but i don't know how else you can measure it other than taking a look at absenteeism going forward and that's i was thinking that in the moment when that one student about i think she's from frederick wheeler when she was speaking and she was saying i would support this i i would you know and so it's like yeah that's what we're experiencing in this room right now is the community has shown up you know and so if you want to have a data
132point to fall back on so when a group requests something say well we're gonna we're gonna table this till next year you know and i'm just putting this out there you know so that you actually have something to look at sure enough there was a two percent tick you know and so that's that wouldn't we wouldn't have to make our decision only on that but if we had a policy that we would then good did you want someone yeah i'd just um i might be unclear but it sounds like you're suggesting um that the students be able to take off without penalty is is yeah like it was like okay yeah okay i just want to be clear on that point for a second so let's say we got two or three at once how
133does that affect us with state law mandating 180 school days does that if school's optional on that day is it considered that's a good point maybe we should have that in the position we can't consider more than one in a year we can only do so much at a time that could be part of the policy actually by understanding that each student is up to 10 excused absences a year tennessee yeah that's a separate you know statute and legal inquiry and absenteeism it's different when a student takes off of school and has an excused absence that's different than a district deciding to do something quote-unquote religious in nature which is a school closure which can't be done for religious reasons you know but allowing an excused absence for a holiday you know that's just state
134law you know that sde has guidance on that um that's already fine you don't have to put that in a new policy i would be absolutely shocked if you don't already have that in a policy well yeah and then there's there's also the the the issue that you know i don't think the muslim community would have left us alone you know if if we said that you know we're let guys let's table this until next year let's see how the absentee rate falls on eid this year and we'll make a decision about it next year i don't know i i feel like it still would have been this perpetual you know what i mean would have been but but if it was already in the policy that would just be the way it is they
135requested that so that's the way we do it it's just thoughts yeah this is just discussion yeah and i totally understand like we're all just sort of brainstorming right now but at the end of the day you know what we're really thinking about is that secondary question which is is it giving us the equality we want is it our aspirations of equality as we see bridgeport pursuing you know that's really what you guys are trying to figure out right now which is like what do we want to do as a district you know all of this stuff sounds you know legally okay again run it all by rebecca whatever you finally choose but again just remember separate the two inquiries is my suggestion my being a board member is my suggestion legally sound and secondarily
136does it you know promote the equality that i want to promote as a board member i mean keep keeping in mind that the secondary thing is that is the driving thing but of course which is the annoying thing about the first thing because it's like you're trying to do the right thing you know right anyone else oh sorry it's the thing miss matisse perez yeah i i do want to comment um regarding eid is that this has come from friends that's lived worked in the school system talking to people that the push for this holiday existed approximately about a decade ago and so um to a certain extent it does kind of support maybe a policy should be done because it was never seriously analyzed but also when i did interact with community leaders uh
137regarding eid as a holiday uh there at least been allegations of when it was brought up to members of the board or the superintendent they were ignored and so this lack of apol to a certain age that this almost supports the idea of having a policy because when you have something that's been being that's been requested for about a decade no one's bothered to follow up with information and then we have the gap of covid on top of all these other international policies that increase the population maybe there should be something in stored but um a bit of the implication that i was going with is how well do we know our population in the community how well do we actually collect the data because those are the points that we actually have to rely
138on so if i see emails and correspondences dating from years back about consideration of this holiday and what the logic to whatever the previous board may have had to ignoring it um you know that at least begs the question the leaders the past leadership then um and you know to a certain extent being able to evaluate and and see what's happening and current times to develop the data points are good but i i wouldn't sit back and pretend that this is a new issue when i've seen evidence and support that or that he was not and that this is something that's been being pushed for years uh so that's my only commentary towards that is i wouldn't want to pretend uh that this is something new but maybe as the the board we could have
139and by we that includes the passport could have been tracking this and collecting data uh far out in advance instead of ignoring the population like i i feel like i i'm i have to go on record and say that because i know that this push has existed for years thank you anyone else yes this was my original when i raised my hand okay about why we're here and it's it's going to be kind of on the coattails of what um perez said that it occurs to me this is a messy topic who wants to deal with this and it appears that people in the past the easiest thing was to just okay just not talk about it but eventually it comes to a head and the issue of heat came up and it went the
140way it went but it begs the question of what happens in the future because again other requests will come eventually you'll get to a point where you're gonna have to have a really serious conversation and the conversation we're having here now is not the one you want to have five years from now when you're backed into a corner trying to figure out who should you give this to who should you give that to so this kind of sets a foundation for the folks that are going to be here 5 10 15 years from now and it'll give them something to look at and say okay this is what we should do so it's a it's a difficult conversation it's going to be a lengthy one it's not something i think is going to be solved
141overnight but it's an important one that will you know save some unfortunate decisions from having to be made way way way down the road so i think this is important even if we're we've had trouble getting up and running yeah well not just us everybody everybody you know except if this has been going on for 10 years yeah and that was the solution let's just talk about it and hope they go away right well that's not the answer here we are so that's that other side of the coin i was talking about yeah does anyone else have anything from mr uh elsing well that's that's it any closing remarks losing remarks it seems like your guy's heart is in the right place continue to follow that um the one thing i will say is the
142nuclear option i don't think is like i don't think i think branford is the most recent one to have done this who acted on this in the past few months i don't think they did it because you know they hate all religions i think to them it was just the clearest simplest way out of what john was very eloquently describing as an incredibly difficult task it was just like well what about this what about this what about this what about this there's so many branching questions that this discussion creates that i think sometimes the nuclear option is just like this is the only way to pursue equality and not be sued in this specific legal scenario it's just nobody gets anything which is honestly the least satisfying scenario nine times out of ten for people
143at a negotiating table or on a board of bed or at the dinner table you know nobody getting anything is kind of not the solution everybody's looking for but i don't think it should be frowned upon as like a loss you know it it is a very valid option because a lot of what i've heard sort of the logical conclusion that a lot of these things take you down is that anybody can come to present any holiday and get it cancelled but again like the other board member was saying don't try to create an answer for a question that may not exist maybe this is the last holiday that will ever be pursued by a bridgeport community for the next 30 years i don't know you guys don't know that you know the policy may
144be the best way forward but it may not be a problem anymore but again doing nothing seems a little wrong i think in this scenario because of that secondary question about equality you know you want to create something that makes the community feel involved and represented it just can't be religious in nature unfortunately and i think john's leadership on saying wanting to leave you know a road map for future boards you know is great and i hope you guys come up with an answer i'm here call me email me patrice mccarthy is here general counsel call and email her um you know when you come to a decision always engage rebecca i always highly suggest that um but you know i'm happy to talk through this problem and like john said this is not we
145didn't answer tonight i mean i didn't at least maybe you guys did um but you know it it may take a while but i think it's worth it it's worth the road ahead and you know just the one parting thing i will say is separate the two questions in your mind are we violating the first amendment which does not care about equality and then secondarily are we promoting the equality we want to promote even though i said i was closing remarks we have a couple more uh hands up so uh joe just shorter now i've raised even more questions um no although although i'm for option four with no policy if this committee is moving in the direction of creating a positive policy perhaps we should have can't go to work and give us a
146draft of their policies they're the data policy experts and they've never done it before for this particular issue maybe they could be helpful and we can engage their services which i believe is part of our package correct i don't work in policy i i am not i mean as the staff attorney like i do a lot of different things but you know a request can come into the policy department and if they see a need for creating a policy that's going to affect more than just bridgeport you know they'll they'll draft one but again i don't think the problem is drafting the policy like if you guys knew what you wanted to do i could literally write it right now in 10 minutes you know just based on my typing and legal ability you know
147the problem is not what i'm gonna put in the policy the problem is what you guys want in the policy that's right that's what you guys need to decide as a board first it doesn't matter if rebecca or cabe writes it you know and that's why i think we don't really have one on this because it's so incredibly specific to what you want to achieve as a board with it being laden with a minefield of legal problems you know because again we're not lazy people the reason we don't have a sample on this isn't because we don't feel like writing one it's just it's such a difficult legal issue and it's so district specific about what you want i mean i'm just right i'm just wondering as the other districts i think there's two of
148the districts in connecticut that already approved have they faced similar issues and want similar policies have they reached out for any well they all engage me personally um and we didn't create a policy i could ask our policy staff tomorrow if they came actually that's going to be fruitless because i asked him last week when this problem was first brought to my attention have we dealt with this issue and do we have a sample you know and we just don't you know and they couldn't remember being asked this you know like i said the most recent thing i know of is brantford and they just sort of had a generic statement on being non-religious and non-denominational and we could do too right take them all away so i i think that's what you were saying
149is we're actually being cutting edge well yeah and and i mean obviously the my personal response to brantford is that our district looks nothing like brantford right you know so obviously what works for them is likely not to say that it wouldn't work for us but it would put the next generation of board members sort of in the same spot and you know it's a real opportunity to to to lead and i think we should take that into consideration mrs baptist press your hand up still um i pretty much summed up what i had to say is don't create an answer to a question that doesn't exist the e question exists we've made the decision um that looks like it passes the lemon test uh from my understanding the creation of this was trying to
150answer questions to a changing population and i think part of the implication is that well what if we have changes in the demographics can we can we take back a holiday because no one in the district it's it would create for example maybe taking back something because it's not causing a disruption in the school day by the educators or the students uh but the fact of the matter is that it if there's no problem i i don't see why uh trying to create something doesn't exist and to the extent that like eid was a movement that took time that was encouraged by additional policy a growing in a change in the demographics and increasing the population of muslim um p uh following that religious background in this in this city um created the momentum that
151was needed to track that uh uh that particular information but as far as like other holidays that have not come to our attention um spreading uh information either if it is something maybe it should be brought forward and it will be evaluated at a later time but nothing else is on the table as far as i know so i i don't know diwali could be next week like things got done with my comment i just because it doesn't exist or i'm not aware of it like this is something where we probably should just inform the community of the option and see what comes into fruition and then when the problem oh well that's that's the lawyer but if the event presents itself then we can go about answering it but there doesn't seem like there's
152a push right now for one example was diwali wanting or the luna lunar new year like we don't have that right now so i don't see why i don't understand why we're trying to create a policy to something that's not in front of us and as we can see it's already difficult so i don't i don't see the purpose at this particular time um and and and it does give us time to grow as the district as to how we're going to collect data moving forward um and i don't think we should take any action oh well it's your com it's up to the committee but i don't see the pressing issue at this time to take any action it actually has been brought up by at least one board member that i know of
153different holidays as suggestions so we did we did set up that's the board member and not the community at large i understand and we we did set out i did state the first meeting that we were not going to try to be preemptive and change the calendar as it may have been suggested so there seems to be need for this and i know you did mention earlier that maybe you did see a reason for policy or maybe not so it's definitely worth discussing um and i'm glad that there's participation by the board members as well as the committee um so does anyone else have anything have a motion to adjourn moved second all in favor aye aye all right thank you very much everyone thank you thank you conrad later guys good luck thank you
154you