Charter schools seek NC help to offer daily in-person classes to all students
Updated March 26 with DHHS now letting charter schools go Plan A all grades.
Proposed legislation filed Wednesday would allow North Carolina charter schools to offer full-time, daily in-person instruction to middle school and high school students.
Charter schools were exempted from a recently adopted state law requiring school districts to offer in-person instruction this school year. But excluding charter schools meant they were not covered under the law’s provisions allowing school districts to use Plan A, which has “minimal social distancing” requirements, in all grade levels.
House Bill 324 would give charter schools the same authority as school districts to use Plan A in all grades. State Department of Health and Human Services guidelines already allow elementary schools, including charters, to use Plan A.
Under the bill, charter schools that move to Plan A in middle and high schools would have to follow the same requirements that school districts must adhere to in the school reopening law. This includes submitting plans to DHHS and partnering with the ABC Science Collaborative to collect and analyze student data.
The bill’s four primary sponsors, all Republicans, are Reps. Jason Saine of Lincoln County, James Boles of Moore County, Larry Yarborough of Person County and John Torbett of Gaston County.
Charter schools are taxpayer funded and are exempt from some of the regulations that traditional public schools must follow. There are 125,000 students attending 200 charter schools in the state.
Republican lawmakers had said that they didn’t include charter schools in school reopening bills because families can leave them at any time. But not including charters in the new law bound them to DHHS guidelines that say middle schools and high schools can only use Plan B, which requires 6 feet of social distancing due to the threat of COVID-19.
The Plan B “moderate distancing” requirement resulted in secondary schools using a hybrid of in-person and online classes instead of daily in-person instruction.
Some school districts have already used the new state law to move middle schools and high schools to Plan A. The Wake County school board will vote Monday on moving secondary schools to Plan A in April.
Charter schools want Plan A option
State Superintendent Catherine Truitt, a Republican, said this week that charter schools have asked the state Department of Public Instruction “for some sort of fix.” But Truitt said they didn’t have the authority to allow charter schools to use Plan A in grades 6-12.
“We have been working with the charter school community to try to figure out a resolution to that issue since many of them wish to go back in Plan A,” Allison Schafer, general counsel to the State Board of Education, said at Monday’s board meeting.
Schafer said it would take a “slight legislative addition” to help the charter schools with secondary school grades.
Truitt called it an “oversight” that charter schools were not included in the state law. But Schafer said it was her understanding that charter schools “opted out of the bill.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 3:07 PM.
