Max Kolinski ’27 walks into school early in the morning, heading to the Foods Lab for Polish Club Live Cooking, a Polish Heritage Month event. As he meets his other Polish peers, he prepares materials and ingredients to make popular Polish dishes like Nalesniki, fruit-filled and sweet-filled pancakes. Although the school doesn’t recognize most holidays during Polish Heritage Month in October, Kolinski and the Polish club have found many ways to continue celebrating Polish culture.
While federal holidays like Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth are designated as non-attendance days, many holidays students celebrate are not recognized at Stevenson. This creates situations where students like Kolinski must decide whether to take off a school day to celebrate their holiday or attend their classes and sacrifice celebrations.
“Unfortunately, in my last two years at Stevenson, I have not taken any of these days off,” Kolinski said. “It’s upsetting that I can’t spend time with my family to celebrate Nov. 1 and 2, our All Saints and Souls Days, respectively, and Nov. 11, our Polish Independence Day. Those days are not officially recognized by the Stevenson administration.”
Because he can’t fully celebrate cultural holidays with his family, Kolinski finds that he struggles to connect with his culture. LeViis Haney, Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), believes that creating communication plans where faculty and students alike are aware of the various cultural holidays is important to reflect Stevenson’s diversity.
“It’s super important that the home cultures of our students are not lost or forgotten by our students,” Haney said. “There’s room to acknowledge the mainstream holidays, but still celebrate the holidays in everyone’s culture.”
Although Haney encourages students to stay engaged with their culture, he also notes that assessments and activities can make balancing school and cultural commitments difficult. Haney has created a special EDI committee composed of students, faculty, and administrators tasked with organizing a cultural holiday communications plan. Rayaan Shaik ’25, Vice President of the Muslim Student Association and EDI committee member, is frustrated that the school can interfere with the Muslim holidays he celebrates.
“One holiday I mentioned in the EDI committee was Eid al-Fitr,” Shaik said. “Eid al-Fitr is huge for me and a lot of my Muslim peers because it was on the day of the SAT, and because of that, we had our own cultural obligations and had to make up the test.”
Because of the complications conflicts between holidays and school can cause, Shaik advocates for more acceptance and education surrounding such holidays. However, Haney points out that the Stevenson administration struggles to create a cultural calendar because students come from over 50 different cultures. In addition, according to Kolinski, certain customs in Polish culture come with more time-intensive traditions, which can make taking time off that much more difficult.
“Some Polish individuals who reside in the US occasionally request for their funeral and final resting place to be in Poland,” Kolinski said. “It’s difficult to celebrate these days without taking an extreme amount of time off as a flight to Poland is 8 hours and the flight back is around 10 hours.”
Because his cultural traditions can take substantially much time off of school, Kolinski worries about his academic performance if he were to miss school. Similarly, Haney emphasizes that the distribution of assessments should take into consideration the holidays that students observe, ultimately supporting students in maintaining their performance at school while connecting with their cultures. Even outside of assessments, Shaik is thankful for how teachers have provided resources that allow him to follow customs at school.
“There have been one or two teachers throughout my high school career that come up to me and say, ‘Hey…I think you mentioned that you’re Muslim and you celebrate this and that, so I hope you’re aware of the school prayer room that’s in the ILC,’” Shaik said. “They also offered me a space where I could fast in a sense; I didn’t have to sit next to other peers while they ate food, and I could have this sort of solitary space to myself.”
While Shaik has had support from his teachers in informing them of holidays he celebrates, Kolinski suggests that the administration should add an option when making absence requests for students to select when they need to take time off for holidays and other occasions to respect such cultures. He also suggests that the administration should seek student input in selecting and raising awareness for such holidays.
“Adding these holidays and events in our d125.org calendar would be something that would be beneficial,” Kolinski said. “We are always fighting to add these items to our calendar such as our Polish Community Night, which is held on the first Friday of May. If this was on our D125 calendar, it would bring our community closer.”
Kolinski feels that adding commemorative markers to the school calendar will help raise awareness for many cultural events and educate students on pertinent holidays, all while bringing members of the SHS community together. Even so, Haney stresses the importance of ensuring teachers, faculty, and the administration meet the needs of all its students to remember the many diverse cultures that Stevenson has.
“When our students and families celebrate cultural holidays, sometimes there’s this feeling of ‘I don’t want to be different from everyone else around me,’” Haney said. “Because we have a rich, diverse community at SHS, we hope to continue to make students feel comfortable sharing their holiday traditions with us in order for us to celebrate our diversity.”