School District Responds to Teachers' Lawsuit over Good Friday Leave Request Denials

The Cranston School Committee and school superintendent have released a joint statement responding to the lawsuit filed Monday by the Cranston Teachers’ Alliance over the denial of teacher requests for religious leave on Good Friday.

The statement is as follows:

“It is unfortunate that the Cranston Teachers’ Alliance initiated a lawsuit regarding Good Friday. Certainly, we always seek to respect our students’ and staff’s religious practices,” said Judith A. Lundsten, Superintendent of Cranston Public Schools. “From our perspective, this is about a calendar that was agreed upon and passed by the school committee nine months ago. Teachers, teacher assistants, technical assistants and bus aides have the provision in their contracts to request up to two (2) religious observance days. The contractual language states, they may be granted the day off if their, “religious observance obligations require attendance at religious services held during the school day….”

“Upon information and belief, the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah does not allow work and requires attendance at services held during the school (work) day. Based on that, the requests for the days off were granted to those who requested them. Based on information and belief, Good Friday has no required services. As a result, the request for the day off was denied for those who requested it.”

Lundsten continues, “Also, the Cranston Teachers’ Alliance actively negotiated teacher assistant, technical assistant and bus aide contracts. In those negotiations, teacher assistants, technical assistants and bus aides sought to increase their hourly wage by giving up certain paid holidays. Good Friday was one of those paid holidays; so to come back with this lawsuit is rather surprising.”

According to Janice Ruggieri, Chairperson of the Cranston School Committee, “We have attempted to resolve this issue with the Cranston Teachers’ Alliance before this point. Our suggestions for resolving this before it became a lawsuit were rejected by the leadership of the CTA. It has been a long, difficult winter for our parents, students and staff. We have already accumulated six additional days to our school year. We should be focusing on finishing the school year by meeting our students’ academic calendar requirements. We also have construction projects scheduled to begin on students’ last day of school.” “Furthermore,” says Ruggieri, “as the 2014-2015 calendar was approved last June, this should come as a surprise to no one. While in past years schools were closed on certain religious holidays, the current calendar eliminated those holidays. I do not think changing the calendar at this time would be prudent.”

As this matter involves ongoing litigation, the school committee chairperson and the superintendent will not comment further.