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Welcome back to school, readers. It’s time to discuss a perennial problem — the academic calendar.

Let’s start with a quick jaunt back a century to Aug. 22, 1924. Our headline reads: “Domestic items of interest: Observance of High Holy Days Made Possible for Jewish Students.”

According to the article, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations “in accordance with an annual custom, has just sent a Jewish holy day calendar to hundreds of educators throughout the United States, asking that they arrange their examinations so as to avoid, particularly, Monday, Sept. 29th (Rosh Hashanah) and Wednesday, Oct. 8th (Yom Kippur). The replies to these requests for co-operation received by the Union have been whole-heartedly co-operative.”

Cooperative or not, that certainly wasn’t the last we wrote about the topic. This vexed issue — what to do when a Jewish holiday falls on the start of the term, an exam day or even a regular school day — is one that comes up every year for Jewish families.

“The conflict between the civil calendar and the Jewish calendar is one that Jews of the Diaspora must deal with by necessity,” our publication wrote in 1971. “The problem is a real one for parents with children who attend public school.”

It’s not just a K-12 issue. In a 1985 article, Peggy Isaak Gluck wrote about Stanford University, which scheduled the first day of classes that year on Yom Kippur. The university then “agreed to avoid such conflicts for its Jewish students and faculty members in the future. Stanford, a private institution, is the first major university in the Bay Area to make such an agreement, at the urging of its Jewish faculty.”

Unfortunately that intention wasn’t always followed through, as even in 2022 we pointed out that Stanford scheduled its first day on Rosh Hashanah.

In 2014, it was the University of California system that ended up making an unexpected calendar shuffle to avoid move-in day conflicting with Rosh Hashanah.

Of course, there has been progress since 1924 — stirred by a Jewish case.

In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Zorach v. Clauson. New York City’s public school district was allowing students to be released from class for religious instruction, and the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that said such a program did not violate the constitutional separation of church and state. (This case was notably different from a 1948 case in which the religious instruction happened onsite, which the court opposed.)

The ruling gave a fundamental legal underpinning to the idea that families were allowed to take a child out of school for important religious holidays.

The Zorach case, however, was arguing against that. He and another parent named Esta Gluck sued the school board, arguing not for the right to take children out of school for religious instruction, but against that.

“Mrs. Gluck and Tessim Zorach, both parents of children who were attending public schools in Brooklyn, sued the Board of Education in 1949,” according to her 1985 obituary in the New York Times. “They charged that the released-time policy, then in effect for seven years, violated the separation of church and state. Mrs. Gluck and Mr. Zorach denied that they were against religion, pointing out that their children attended religious schools, but not during school time.”

After that case, the push to recognize nondominant religions in the U.S. increased. In New York City in the early 1970s, Jewish teachers lobbied — and won — for spring break to match up with Passover. The city added two Muslim holidays in 2015.

Currently, NYC’s school district closes for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Election Day, Diwali, Christmas Eve, Lunar New Year, Good Friday, Eid al-Fitr, Passover (first two days) and Eid al-Adha, as well as the usual suspects, aka public holidays, such as Christmas Day.

San Francisco’s schools don’t close for nonpublic holidays other than Lunar New Year, but California law states that students are excused from school to participate in religious rituals “with the written consent of their parents or guardians.”

Does it even matter? Should students in public schools should just put academics first or deal with the consequences?

Ava Hinz, then a Mountain View High School junior, offered a student’s perspective in a 2019 opinion piece, “It’s time for High Holidays to become official school holidays.”

“While there are excused absences for religious holidays, Jewish students are often either unable to celebrate because they do not want to miss school, or they have to catch up on what they missed,” Hinz wrote. “School is already stressful enough, and not being in class causes students to miss important lectures, classwork or assessments.”

Or take a look back to our 1971 editorial. We quoted Rabbi Jack Frankel of San Francisco’s Congregation Ner Tamid, who said that “self-respect, affirmation of Jewish values, and ‘Jewish Power,’ if nothing else, demand that we proclaim the sanctity of our major festivals. If we do not, no one will respect us.”

That may or may not be the case. But it is true that in 2022, the San Francisco school board voted to make sure school would not be in session on two major Muslim holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. After several lawsuits, the school board tabled the plan. Then last year, the school board made another U-turn and scheduled spring break so that it would coincide with Eid al-Fitr.

This school year, however, most of those who celebrate religious holidays will be out of luck. Even Easter doesn’t fall during the 2025 spring break. Maybe that’s as much progress as we can hope for.