The State Senate voted unanimously this week to make the first day of the Asian lunar calendar a school holiday in New York City, and the State Assembly plans to consider a similar bill next week, suggesting that the Legislature does not want to wait for the de Blasio administration to reach its own decision on the issue.
The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, said on Thursday that making the Lunar New Year a holiday was “a matter of fundamental respect to New York’s large Asian community, and we will be taking up the bill when we return next week.” The Senate bill passed on Tuesday.
The Lunar New Year is observed across much of Asia. When it falls on a school day in the city, schools with large Asian populations can have as many as 80 percent of their students stay home to celebrate with their families. The bill applies to school districts of cities with populations of one million or more that also have an Asian population of at least 7.5 percent, criteria that apply only to New York.
Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged during the mayoral campaign to make both the Lunar New Year and the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha official school holidays. In March, he announced that schools would close on the Eid holidays next year (Eid al-Fitr will fall during the summer in 2016, and summer schools will close), but his administration said it needed more time to analyze the effect of closing schools on the Lunar New Year. State law requires schools to have 180 days of instruction each year.
Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, said on Thursday that the department was “working through the logistics of adding Lunar New Year while maintaining the legally mandated number of school days.”
Assemblyman Ron Kim of Queens the sponsor of the Assembly bill, said that because of the mayor’s delay in addressing the issue, “we decided that we need to take measures in our own hands.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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