After the Knicks championship victory on Saturday, some New York students hoped for another miracle: a reprieve from their end-of-course state science exams on Thursday so that they could attend the ticker-tape parade for the team’s first title in 53 years.
But the exams will go on.
Officials at the New York State Education Department said on Monday that the four tests, known as Regents exams, will take place as planned on Thursday.
The schedules for the tests, which are set by the state and not the New York City Department of Education, were released long before there was any reason to think that the Knicks could shake five decades of bad luck and win the N.B.A. finals.
“New Yorkers are rightfully excited to celebrate the Knicks, but our students have been preparing all year for this moment, too,” said JP O’Hare, a spokesman at the Education Department. “Just like the Knicks, they’ve put in the work and earned their chance to shine.”
The parade starts at 10 a.m., just as two exams, Living Environment and Life Science: Biology, are supposed to be underway. Two more will follow in the afternoon, Physical Setting/Earth Science and Earth and Space. Several hundred thousand students across the state, mainly high school students, take the exams every year.
Moments after Saturday’s game, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the date of the parade. Almost immediately, students and parents launched online petitions urging that the Regents exams be moved. Others appealed to Mr. Mamdani on social media. but he has no say regarding the Regents exams. On Monday, Mr. Mamdani urged students to stay in school on Thursday.
“My encouragement would be that you should still be taking the Regents,” Mr. Mamdani said in an interview on NY1. “Unlike the executive order for bedtime, this is something I cannot repeal.”
Many of the petitions pleaded for relief, stressing what could be a sad reality for lifelong and long-suffering Knicks fans: If history is any guide, the next championship parade may not be in their lifetime.
“The scheduling of the N.Y. Regents exams on June 18 threatens to prevent us from partaking in this historic moment,” Jayden King, a 10th-grade student in the Copiague Public School District on Long Island, wrote in a petition that he created. His Earth Science exam was scheduled for Thursday.
His father, Peter King, said that their father-son relationship was rooted in their love for the Knicks. They watch every game together, often on the television in Jayden’s room because they believe that the team plays better when they watch in his room.
“We’ve been waiting our whole lives, and it’s an opportunity for us to experience that together as a family,” Peter King, 43, said.
He said that his family had turned their sadness about missing the parade into a teaching moment for Jayden. “The Knicks have taught us that there are disappointments in life,” he said.
Another petition was created by Michelle Weintraub, who said that her daughter, Bryn, had been “hysterical all weekend” after she realized her Living Environment exam was on Thursday morning. Bryn, 13, attends Bell Academy in Queens.
“This is a really emotional, social and mental shake-up for a 13-year-old,” Ms. Weintraub said.
Ms. Weintraub said that while she believed her daughter deserved to be able to attend the parade, she had accepted that she and her husband could not. Ms. Weintraub teaches at P.S. 55, an elementary school in Queens, and her husband, Evan Weintraub, is a middle-school dean at I.S. 25 Adrien Block School.
“This conflict has caused immense stress in my home,” Ms. Weintraub said.
When the Giants won the Super Bowl in 2012, the team’s ticker-tape parade took place on a Tuesday. Some students skipped school, just as many did after the Yankees won the World Series in 1998.
Those parades did not conflict with the Regents exams. But the celebration when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup did conflict with the Spanish end-of-course exam in 1994. The state did not reschedule that exam either.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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