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Like most high school seniors, Vee Pressley of Deep Run High School in Glen Allen couldn’t wait to attend prom. But when the invitations went out, her heart sank. Prom was scheduled for April 12 — Passover — and she would have to miss out.
“Passover is the most important holiday for our family,” says Pressley, who is Jewish. “Every year, I go to Florida to celebrate with my grandparents, my great aunt and my cousins. We share a meal and rituals together — there’s a lot of religious tradition.”
Pressley wasn’t ready to give up on her senior prom, so she decided to take action. She set up meetings with school administration and created an online petition, asking her classmates to “imagine if prom were on Christmas.” She garnered 178 signatures from classmates and friends, most of whom are not Jewish.
“A calendar oversight is negligence, it’s microdiscrimination to minority students,” she says. “If you have ever experienced discrimination, it’s your duty to stand up for other minorities.”
As a result of Pressley’s efforts, Deep Run High School’s principal, Brian Fellows, announced he would change prom to May 3. “As a school community, we are committed to being inclusive and respectful of all religious holidays,” Fellows wrote in a March 13 email. “However, when planning this year’s prom, we selected April 12 and we failed to consider that the date coincides with Passover. We fell short of our goal of being inclusive and respectful of religious holidays — and for that I am truly sorry.”
When his email went out, Pressley says she was inundated with congratulatory texts from her classmates.
“I feel amazed that my work paid off and so encouraged to keep fighting for social justice,” she says. “None of it would have been possible without my friends, who supported me endlessly, and our principal, who went the extra mile to fix this mistake. I truly hope that other schools take after his example.”
Then she adds, “Also, I’m going to prom! Woohoo!”
