SHERBURNE – Since when and why did Good Friday become ‘Spring Friday’ on the Sherburne Earlville Central School District’s calendar?

Those were the questions Smyrna resident John W. Cook Jr., a taxpayer in the district, posed before the S-E Board of Education Monday evening.

Superintendent Gayle Hellert responded that the Delaware, Chenango, Madison, Otsego BOCES regional education agency, of which S-E is one of 16 districts, creates the calendar every year. She said BOCES had printed ‘Spring Friday’ on their calendars for the past couple of years.

“And you are all OK with the naming of Christian holidays by BOCES?” Cook asked.

Good Friday, also known as Holy Friday, Black Friday, Great Friday, is a holiday observed primarily by Christians commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The holiday is observed during Holy Week on the Friday preceding Easter Sunday, and often coincides with the Jewish observance of Passover. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Easter Sunday, and Passover are all represented on the BOCES calendar.

After a brief discussion between board members, Hellert and Board President Doug Shattuck said they would bring Cook’s concern before the DCMO BOCES committee that determines the calendar as well as to the board’s executive committee for review.

“Certainly, if it’s a concern, we can circulate it through,” said Shattuck.

Following the exchange, Cook said, “The sad thing is there was nobody there who questioned it.”

In fact, Sherburne-Earlville’s 2009-2010 school year calendar and the BOCES calendar itself are the only ones in the DCMO BOCES region that used the words ‘Spring Friday’ this year in place of ‘Good Friday.’ Hellert was also mistaken that the words had been used for two years, as the S-E district’s 2008-2009 calendar listed ‘Good Friday.’

To create and propose a calendar each year, a committee of two to three district superintendents within the BOCES system, led by Superintendent Robert Mackey of the Unadilla Valley Central School District, meets several times. All 16 superintendents within BOCES then review the proposal with their boards of education, teacher’s unions, and administrations before voting on it. The BOCES calendar is then used as a guide in developing individual school calendars.

“Primarily it’s the same calendar. They (the individual districts) might make slight changes to it like changing staff development days or other days off,” said Jo Ann Winsor, secretary to DCMO BOCES President William Tammaro and Clerk of the BOCES Board of Education.

Those slight changes have included changing ‘Spring Friday’ to ‘Good Friday.’ A long-time administrative assistant of a BOCES system school in Chenango County, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that she has personally changed the words back to ‘Good Friday’ for the past several years, at first on-site in the BOCES print shop while the calendars were being printed, and, years later, online electronically.

“It depends on how much time (staff has to review the proposed BOCES calendars), but usually it’s somebody like me, some little cog in the wheel, who changes it,” she said.