One of our country’s greatest strengths is its diversity.

We thought of that as we watched the latest Guilderland School Board meeting.

Decades ago, we advocated on this page for the board to recognize Rosh Hashanah, the first of the Jewish High Holy Days, as a school holiday. At that time, the board was deeply divided with the majority deciding it was safest to stick to having school closed solely on federal holidays.

The school district has evolved over the years as it has welcomed a more diverse student body.

More recently, we wrote about Muslim students advocating for Eid to be a school holiday, a process that took several years before it became a reality.

This past December, we wrote about a campaign launched by Paarth Sarecha, a Guilderland junior, to have Diwali recognized as a school holiday. A remarkably earnest young man, he told us about the meaning the holiday held for him and his family.

Not having school recognition of his essential holiday was alienating. Sarecha, a student representative who articulately updates the school board on high school activities each month, struggled to find the words, without being offensive, to express his feeling of being excluded.

“It does feel like — how do I describe it? — kind of like, almost left out,” he says.

Sarecha said he is “really happy” that Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, and now Eid are school holidays. “I’m really glad we’re starting to recognize all these different religions, all these diverse people,” he said, adding, “We would be noninclusive to not have Diwali on the calendar at this point.”

“I feel like, also, one billion people celebrate Diwali worldwide and millions of people support celebrating in the U.S.,” said Sarecha, “not just religiously but culturally, like lighting a candle in the house, for example — and so like really believing in that symbolism of light over dark.”

He told us in December that he had nearly 120 signatures of students on a petition to make Diwali a school holiday and that, once he got to 200, he would petition the board.

On Jan. 14, he made good on his word, with nearly 230 student signatures on his petition. The school has nearly 1,500 students so the petitioners make up more than 15 percent of the student body.

Sarecha told the board he was proud that Guilderland was a pioneer in diversity, equity, and inclusion. “We come here today with the hope that Guilderland continues to be a leader in DEI and adds Diwali, a Hindu holiday, to the district calendar,” he said.

“Diwali is our Christmas, our Eid, and our Hanukkah …,” another Guilderland student told the board, standing alongside Sarecha. “Oftentimes,” she said, “with Diwali falling on a school day, it can be extremely difficult to find the time to do your homework, wake up early to pray, and then rush to school, and go to the temple and help around the house.”

“One of my favorite things is when students use their voice,” said the school board’s president, Blanca Gonzalez-Parker, who announced she was in “full support” of making Diwali a school holiday.

She later polled the other seven present board members, none of whom objected. “I knew it was coming,” said board member Kim Blasiak. “I saw the article in The Enterprise and I absolutely support it.”

Superintendent Marie Wiles had told us in December that adding a school holiday is “a huge process,” involving not just the Capital District Board of Cooperative Educational Services but neighboring BOCES, too, as well as following state directives.

“We still have to get 180 days of instruction” between Sept. 1 and June 30, she said. As with the Muslim students who requested Eid be a school holiday, Wiles said, “If we do it, we need to do it every year, not just when it works out.”

She concluded in December that it was “not possible to say now” whether Diwali could be added as a holiday.

But at the Jan. 14 meeting, Wiles said of the upcoming school year, “It is a very kind calendar.” That’s because Labor Day “is as early as it can possibly be” and the last day of school is late, with graduation on June 26, allowing for leeway in between.

The tentative calendar, which has yet to be reviewed by the district’s leadership team, teachers, and business office, does indeed include Diwali as a school holiday.

Wiles cautioned, “Not every year is as forgiving … There will be a point where you’re going to have to make choices.”

What buoyed us, though, in this time of rising hatred — the state comptroller in August reported on a “concerning surge” in hate crimes — was the board’s immediate acceptance of the need to recognize a non-Christian holiday because a substantial number of students had petitioned for it.

Over the decades, we have watched the evolution of the Guilderland schools, even before DEI was a catchphrase, to become more inclusive. As the student body became more diverse — in terms of racial, ethnic, and religious make-up but also as students became more willing to come out as gay or lesbian or transgender — we have seen school leadership rise to the challenge of meeting each student’s needs.

We saw the most radical change just a few years ago during the nationwide racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. Wiles and other school leaders listened to a half-dozen Guilderland graduates, all of them Black women, talk about the racism they had experienced while students in the district.

“If we do not seize this moment to make real changes, shame on all of us …,” Wiles told us in the summer of 2020. “We’re at a watershed moment in our country. George Floyd and what happened to him just woke people up. Great numbers are starting to see there really is systemic racism that we haven’t been really appreciative of.”

She also said, “This is more than just about Guilderland Central School District .… The conversation has to extend to our larger community. I welcome everyone to be courageous and dive in ….”

School board members were passionate about pursuing changes in curriculum, policy, and staff training and recruitment. The board created a new administrative post, DEI director, and appointed a DEI committee.

These are the times when holding to those principles is imperative.

“Many DEI programs are sputtering or dying, and the anti-DEI movement is ascendant …,” writes John Hendrickson in the current edition of The Atlantic. “During the final months of the first Trump administration, some people in mainstream circles saw attacking DEI as akin to publicly displaying prejudice. Now, not even five years later, for a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity.”

He cites Elon Musk blaming the historically destructive California wildfires on DEI practices within the Los Angeles Fire Department and Fox host Megyn Kelly zeroing in on the department’s female leadership and its first openly LGBTQ fire chief, Kristin Crowley, who is a 22-year veteran of the department: “Who takes comfort [in] ‘I’m going to die, but it’s in the presence of an obese lesbian’? This is ridiculous,” Kelly said on her podcast.

Hendrickson also cites a Financial Times story that quoted an unnamed “top banker” who felt “liberated” and excited at the prospect of no longer having to self-censor. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled,” the banker said. “It’s a new dawn.”

We see it rather as dusk — and darkness will prevail if not just our schools, where students learn lifelong values, but each of us as a human being does not make an effort to see and respect our differences while acknowledging our common humanity.

We wrote after Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency how a Guilderland woman, the late Fazana Saleem-Ismail, believed her children were hurt because Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric gave others, including her children’s classmates, permission to express hate.

After Trump won the November 2016 election, Saleem-Ismail, working with the Capital District Coalition Against Islamophobia, hosted an Albany rally the same day as a victory rally was held by the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

“When one community is targeted, we are all targeted; we are all part of humanity…There is power in numbers,” Saleem-Ismail said of her reasons for organizing the rally.

“That we have a president-elect who was endorsed by a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan is frightening, and so is having white supremacists among his appointments,” Saleem-Ismail told us. “We believe our strength comes from our diversity.”

The Albany rally on a blustery December day was diverse indeed. Hundreds of people — young and old, Black and white and Asian, gay and straight, Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, Muslims, and a Quaker poet — listened as Saleem-Ismail asked at the start of the rally, “Can you feel the love?”

“Yeah!” roared the crowd in return.

“We today are building a movement … to work against forces of hate,” she said.

 “Eighty percent of the people who live in this city were marginalized and mocked,” said Albany’s mayor at that rally. Kathy Sheehan also said, “I’m a woman … I’m not an object, someone you can just grope if you feel like it.”

Deb Riitano spoke for the Capital Area Council of Churches, saying the council was “keenly aware of an increase in hate crimes” and stressing, “We condemn all acts of violence rooted in bigotry and hate …. We will stand together.”

“Come to the Pride Center…,” said the center’s director, “and hold one another.”

Closer to home, Saleem-Ismail started an International Night at Lynnwood Elementary School, where her son was a student. Two-hundred people turned out to get their “passports” stamped as they “visited” 11 countries, each with food to sample and activities to try.

Saleem-Ismail teared up to see how much love and effort the families representing their countries put into their displays. “I’m a firm believer in having children embrace diversity as young as possible,” she said.

So are we. The Guilderland schools are on the right path. It is a path each of us should follow if we want to preserve the richness of America.