Wake County students are getting fewer 5-day school weeks. Here’s what to know

Wake County traditional-calendar students will have a full, five-day school week only 64% of the time during the 2026-27 school year. A researcher warns the frequent teacher workdays could hurt student learning and strain working families.

FULL STORY: Why Wake students will have so many days off from class next school year

Here are key takeaways:

• Wake County traditional-calendar schools are scheduled to have just 25 five-day school weeks in 2026-27, dropping to 23 weeks the following year, according to N.C. State professor and education researcher Anna Egalite.
• Egalite found Wake has more workdays during the school year than any of the nation’s five largest school districts: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami-Dade and Clark County in Nevada.
• Wake schedules 10 of its 17 teacher workdays during the school year for grading at quarter’s end, training, weather makeup days, religious holidays and election days when schools serve as polling sites.
• The school board rejected an alternative calendar that would have added four more five-day weeks. Administrator Tamani Anderson Powell said it would have gone against the district’s practice of having at least one scheduled day off per month.
• Egalite worries about how unsupervised children spend workdays, while parent Catherine Hale defended the schedule on Facebook, saying teachers need the planning time and “we cannot consider school a daycare.”

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The full story in the link at top was reported, written and edited entirely by journalists.