Parents rebuke Calgary school’s downplaying of Ramadan lunch controversy
A school source said the Fairview school Ramadan lunch accommodation controversy was a “misunderstanding” but revelations from parents pointed to a different story.
Author: Melanie Bennet
The Calgary Board of Education was caught red-handed downplaying a school’s Ramadan “no food” lunchroom policy after insisting “no changes” were made. Now parents of students say their kids were barred from eating in the lunchroom during the Muslim holy month.
Juno News previously reported that Fairview School had told parents it would create designated “No Food Spaces” during lunch hours for students fasting during Ramadan.
The Calgary Board of Education responded, citing its religious accommodation policy and stating that “no changes have been made to these designated lunch areas.”
Juno News was then contacted by an internal source at the school who said the situation had been misunderstood and “blown out of proportion.”
“The email is real,” the source said, but maintained that the issue lay in how the spaces named in the email were being interpreted.
Juno News spoke to a Fairview parent who said his child had been eating in the lunchroom before Ramadan. He said that “Gr 7-9 always used the lunchroom.”
“My son got notice,” he said, confirming he received the email that went viral online. He said children “can’t have lunch in their regular lunchroom” during Ramadan this year.
According to that source, the space still referred to as the “cafeteria” had been repurposed as a physical education area and was no longer an active eating space following COVID. The “lunchroom,” the source said, “has not been used as a lunchroom during the current school year.”
“These arrangements were in place well before Ramadan and did not change when Ramadan began,” the source said, adding that “no students were displaced because of Ramadan or because other students were fasting.”
The source also said that “Grades 4–6 eat lunch in their homeroom classrooms under supervision,” while “Grades 7–9 students may leave campus during lunch or eat in the lower gym hallway or the lower east hallway.”
That account is contradicted by later emails from the same source familiar with Fairview operations.
When presented with the parent’s account of events, the internal source admitted that “the grade 9 students were using the lunchroom” prior to Ramadan and that “because there were only a handful of grade 9 students eating in the lunchroom, we shifted them to the cafeteria to eat alongside the grade 7-8s. This left the ‘lunchroom’ open and available for anyone who was fasting.”
That explanation conflicts with the earlier claim that the lunchroom “has not been used as a lunchroom during the current school year” repeated by both the school and the Calgary Board of Education.
It also conflicts with the board’s public statement “no changes have been made to these designated lunch areas.”
The source said that staff were expected to stick to an “approved message,” writing that when “any school ‘makes the news’ we have strict instruction” and that the school board statement that stated “no changes have been made to these designated lunch areas” was all they were approved to provide.
While the source says that they didn’t purposely share incorrect information, they admitted that they “shared outdated information that was on our website. For that, I take responsibility.”
They said they did it because the school has been receiving a lot of emails accusing them of “giving fasting Muslim students who celebrate Ramadan preferential treatment.”
“The school and administration have been accused of not allowing students who want to eat, to either not be allowed to eat or to cower in hallways or on the floor.
“Personally, I think who eats where at what time should be the focus,” they said “correcting that narrative should be the focus.”
In defending the “misinformation” that they provided, they said that “the bottom line is still... no student was denied the opportunity to eat.”