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.
The assistant said she found ‘Spring Friday’ to be offensive and senseless. “Every Friday in the spring is spring Friday,” she said.
Moreover, the assistant said she noticed that the newly completed 2010/2011 BOCES calendars have reverted back to using ‘Good Friday.’
In response to further investigation, Hellert said she took personal responsibility for the ‘Spring Friday’ wording, calling it ‘my error.’
“I really don’t know why we didn’t change it. It was brought to our attention now, and we have already corrected it for next year,” she said.
Mackey was unavailable for comment.

Elementary School Literacy Project
Also at the meeting, a group of elementary school teachers came before the Sherburne-Earlville Central School Board of Education Monday evening to present the results of a $2,500 state grant they won to promote literacy.
The grant was available via the Rural Education Advisory Committee, a state-granted program of Cornell University. The four Sherburne-Earlville teachers’ project was one of eight selected from a pool 500.
Calling themselves ‘the bag ladies,’ the teachers used the funds to continue a three-year long project that provides literacy bags for children to use either alone or with their parents prior to entering Pre-K and Kindergarten.
Elementary teacher Barb Colf said she had been “frustrated” with children who were coming to school lacking fine motor and language skills, and also with their parents for not knowing how to help their children.
“Parents are pleased that we are taking this opportunity to help them help their children,” she said, adding that she noticed more children who could recognize their numbers and letters and were able to use scissors when they came to school last fall.
Parents, also, are building a stronger relationship with teachers, which ultimately helps the students, she said.
The bags for children about to enter kindergarten contain scissors, cutting books, clay, crayons, puppets, a deck of cards, an alphabet book, a numbers book, a nursery rhymes book and tips for parents. The bags for four-year-olds contain age-appropriate books and tips for parents, plus play dough, a bean bag, and blow bubbles. The latter helps youngsters strengthen their mouths for creating alphabet sounds, said Sue Dreyer, Pre-K teacher.