Madison Ford

Entertainment Editor

As a student in Coppell schools since kindergarten, I have seen had the opportunity to see how the district approaches the holiday season in many different environments, and what I have found is both understandable, and a little sad.

In a world that is more focused on being politically correct than culturally aware, my peers and I have grown up in the generation of the “winter” break. Which is a very proper term for the two week period we have off from school in, you guessed it, winter. However, for many, this time of the year holds much more cultural significance, and students seemed to be shielded from the opportunity to learn in order to avoid the risk of coming off biased toward one culture or another. This is not only the winter season, it is the holiday season for many. Instead of taking this period as a chance to teach each other about our various backgrounds, we hide them behind a shield politically correctness.

I can understand why we strive to keep church and state separate, and I believe this is important. I also wish that those winter parties back in elementary school could have been a format for me and my peers to learn about everyone’s culture, whether they were christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, agnostic, or anything in between. We constantly hear about how we as a society struggle to understand each other, but maybe that is because we are more focused on hiding what makes each of us special rather than broadening the horizons of upcoming generations. This concept should not just apply to the month of December, but rather year round so everyone has the opportunity to share their background without fear of local unrest.

Ensuring that no student feels insulted is the most essential focus when it comes to these situations, and it should be. But I hope that we are a society are not missing out on an opportunity to understand each other by hiding behind snowmen instead of sharing our Santas and Dreidels.