At one level, I can understand this Illinois school district’s decision to remove Veteran’s Day as a school holiday. School holidays usual include a district’s need to let teachers and administrators conference during the year, and there can only be so many days off. But the excuse given, that the students don’t understand the meaning of Veteran’s Day says more about district politics than the students.
It’s probably also a clue as to why Illinois (along with Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri) provides only twenty-two percent of the military’s recruit-age men (aged eighteen to twenty-four), according to this 2007 2008 study. Not as bad as the Northeast, which comprises just thirteen percent of the total, but only a bit more than half the forty-three percent from the South, which leads the nation.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 