Temperance and Good Citizenship Day
civic observance
Temperance and Good Citizenship Day is a civic observance in the United States state of Washington, established in 1923 and principally intended for observance in the state's schools. Temperance and Good Citizenship Day occurs annually on January 16, except for years in which January 16 is a "non-school day" in which case it occurs on the preceding Friday.
History
The Washington State Legislature established Temperance and Good Citizenship Day in 1923 with a statute that was subsequently codified as section 28A.230.150 of the Revised Code of Washington (RCW). The law established the date of the observance and mandated that the schools of the state use it to educate students about "the biographies of great leaders in temperance and good citizenship".
In 1969, the wording of the original law was amended to specify that "the state superintendent of public instruction shall duly prepare and publish for circulation among the teachers of the state a program for use on ... [Temperance and Good Citizenship Day] ... embodying topics pertinent thereto and may from year to year designate particular laws for special observance".
In 2013, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced Senate Bill 5753, which was designed to minimize the number of mandates of public schools in observance of lesser-known requirements of state law. Among other things, the law would have repealed the mandate that schools celebrate Temperance and Good Citizenship Day. The bill not only did not advance out of committee, but a competing piece of legislation was simultaneously enacted such that public schools in the state were expected to increase their Temperance and Good Citizenship observances by holding voter registration drives for eligible students on this date.
“Temperance and Good Citizenship Day” enters the record as civic observance. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Temperance, Good and Citizenship can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q48977325. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1969 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Temperance and Good Citizenship Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.