RALEIGH -- North Carolina will not add any new school days this academic year, despite a law to increase the amount of time students are in the classroom, the state Department of Public Instruction said Friday.
All 115 of the state's local school districts sought and received a waiver from a requirement in the new state budget to expand the 180-day school year to 185 this year. The extra classroom time would have been added by taking away five days in which teachers work while students stay home.
The legislature gave state school officials the power to make exceptions if the extra days are used to prepare and train teachers as required by a federal Race to the Top educational grant.
More than half of the state's 99 charter schools also submitted waiver requests. The State Board of Education will consider whether to approve some of those requests when it meets Thursday.
The additional school days were seen by lawmakers as helping students meet learning goals measured by standardized tests while maintaining a statewide law requiring a 10-week summer vacation.
The school calendar law also allows waivers, and 23 school districts with a history of snow-day closings and other weather troubles will be allowed to start earlier than the state-prescribed Aug. 25 opening. Three mountain school districts begin classes Monday.
Burke County's schools needed the waiver from the 185-day rule because its academic calendar was already set by the time the budget was approved in mid-June, superintendent Art Stellar said. Adding classroom days would have cost about $75,000 in transportation, utility and supply costs at a time when budget cuts forced the loss of more than 200 positions, he said.
"If we had had more advance notice, that might have been a little bit different," Stellar said.
The 14,000-student school district was one of 16 that sought a waiver for less than the five extra days.
"We're going to do six additional minutes on every day of the school year, which will add the equivalent of three instructional days. So we only asked for the waiver for two days," Stellar said.
The state school board has long recognized that students need to spend more time hitting the books to compete with countries whose students are spending 200 days or more in class. The standard 180 instructional days in the United States is among the shortest for industrialized nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Gov. Bev Perdue last month signed into law legislation that will create a commission to study the effects of lengthening the school year.
