PHILADEPHIA – Philadelphia’s public schools will now give students the day off for the Muslim religious holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, though the move won’t officially effect all students until 2018.

The holidays, which are celebrated on a different day each year because they follow the lunar calendar, will fall in July for Eid al-Fitar and in September for Eid al-Adha, and district officials did not add the days to next year’s already finalized school calendar. Philadelphia superintendent William Hite Jr. told the Philadelphia Inquirer Muslim students and staff will receive an excused absence for the new holidays next year, and all students will get the days off starting in 2018.

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District officials joined with city leaders at City Hall Tuesday to announce the new Muslim religious school holidays, as well as plans for a task force to consider doing the same for city employees.

“Philadelphia’s history is based on being a place where religious freedom is part of its founding ethos,” Mayor Jim Kenney said. “Our city was built on the idea that while we may be different in nationality and ethnicity, the city welcomes all to worship and practice the faiths of our culture of our choosing.”

The Inquirer reports the school holidays required different sects of the city’s 200,000 Muslims to agree on specific days to celebrate Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha because different Muslim factions typically recognize different days. Philadelphia Eid Coalition chairman Michael Rashid said the city’s Muslims agreed on the dates for the district calendar through the next five years.

The addition of the Muslim holidays spawned from a nonbinding resolution proposed by Muslim city councilman Curtis Jones Jr. in January, shortly after a Philadelphia police officer was shot by a man who claimed to be acting in accordance with Islam, Philly.com reports.

Jones said at the time that he didn’t propose a mandatory resolution because he wanted to allow the city’s unions to weigh in on the proposal.

School district spokesman Gernando Gallard told the news site in January that students can already take the Muslim holidays off with an excused absence if they have a note from a family member, and school employees can take the day off with a note from a religious leader and still receive a third of their pay.

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Currently, city workers get 11 paid holidays, including Christmas and Good Friday, which the school district honors those holidays as well as Rosh Hashanah and Rom Kippur, according to the news site.

Jones told the School Reform Commission, the state-controlled board responsible for improving the chronically failing school district, that Muslims feel like “second-class citizens” in the city’s schools because their holidays are not on the official school calendar.

There was no voiced descent when the city approved Jones’ non-binding resolution in January, according to Philly.com.

Kenney told The Inquirer that examining the Muslim holidays as paid days off for city employees is the “first and foremost” priority for his newly created Task Force on Cultural Inclusion, but he expects the task force will soon branch into other similar religious issues.

“I think it’s wide open and multifaceted,” he said. “We have to take into account how society sometimes ostracizes and eliminates people from the mainstream because of extraneous kind of reasons.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations used Tuesday’s announcement as an opportunity to jab Republicans for allegedly fanning racial tensions in America.

“Unfortunately we’re seeing a spike in anti-Muslim sentiments nationwide, fueled at least in part by the hate filled rhetoric coming from public figures like Donald Trump and Ben Carson and others,” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. “And this helps change that trend. And that’s why it’s very welcome.”