Wake County students to have fewer school days so that teachers can have more workdays

Wake County students will get three fewer days of classes starting in 2019 so that teachers can have more workdays to get training time and to get caught up on their paperwork.

The Wake County school board on Tuesday approved calendars for the 2019-20 school year that schedule 177 days of classes instead of the usual 180 days for students. Wake is eliminating the six early-release days given each school year — half-days when students leave 2 1/2 hours early — to make sure the district continues to provide enough hours of instructional time.

"We’re moving to 177 days and still maintaining 1,025 hours of instruction," Deputy Superintendent Cathy Moore told the school board before the vote.. "That change provides us greater flexibility within the calendar to do some things that are responsive to requests that we've had from schools.

"Primarily to include more teacher workdays, full teacher workdays for teachers to have time to plan and work together in schools."

Go to www.wcpss.net/calendars to download copies of the 2019-20 school calendars.

For many years, North Carolina schools were required to provide at least 180 days of classes and 1,000 hours of instruction each school year.

In 2012, state lawmakers changed the requirements so that schools could have either a minimum of 185 days or 1,025 hours annually. Wake stuck with 180 days because all its schools already had more than 1,025 hours each year.

Wake teachers had complained this year how snow makeup days took away workdays scheduled at the end of each quarter that are often used for entering student grades. This caused teachers to say they had to do the work outside of school hours.

Wake school officials said the state's school calendar law, which requires when traditional-calendar schools can begin and end the school year, had limited their flexibility.

But for the 2019-20 school year, the calendar law allows districts to have classes between Aug. 26 and June 12, compared to Aug. 28 to June 8 this school year. Moore said this allowed Wake to add more teacher workdays to have at least one every month.

The additional workdays in the 2019-20 school year mean none of the ones at the end of the four report card quarters are scheduled as potential weather makeup days. But Moore said that in an emergency, the superintendent is allowed to revise the makeup days in consultation with the school board.

In the process, Moore said, staff removed the six student early release days so that the remaining 177 days of classes are scheduled as full days. She said this change makes sure Wake has enough hours of instruction so that the district keeps the option of being able to not make up three snow days each school year.

Early release days have been used to provide staff development time for teachers. But Moore said some teachers had questioned the usefulness of the early release days.

Lee Quinn said he and many of other members of the superintendent's teacher advisory council had told Moore in the fall that they thought the early release days should be eliminated to have more full teacher workdays.

"I’m glad to see that our feedback was valued," said Quinn, a teacher at Broughton High School in Raleigh. "My opinion was based on my experience that early release days do a less-than-ideal job of both teaching and of professional development."

This story was originally published April 11, 2018 at 11:14 AM with the headline "Wake County students to have fewer school days so that teachers can have more workdays."