In 2004, the North Carolina General Assembly legally banned public schools from starting earlier than Aug. 28. Encouraged mostly by the tourism industry, the idea was to secure more weeks in the summer for students to spend time with family and, more importantly, to put money back into North Carolina’s tourist-centered beaches and mountains.
Wake County, as well as several other counties, have begun raising issues with this law within the past few years. The late start date lowers the school boards’ calendar flexibility, especially when it comes to exams; final exams for the fall semester can often be found after winter break, rather than before. Simply put, the continuation of the first semester into the new year causes unnecessary stress of planning and testing through winter break.
Several counties in the Charlotte area have already successfully decided to break North Carolina’s calendar law, with many others considering the move as well. Union County signed a law-breaking calendar into effect for the 2024 to 2025 school year, making it the largest county in the state to do so, before quickly being sued by parents and reverting the decision.
Wake County recently decided to side with the standard calendar and begin school on Aug. 27 for the next school year, but this battle will undoubtedly come up again next year, as it did in 2023 and years prior.
Regardless of Wake County’s continued compliance, the idea of intentionally breaking the law for increased county freedom is a very slippery slope. Not only does it show young children that laws can be broken for “good reasons,” it opens up countless other opportunities for local governments to ignore higher authority. It’s important to cater government to their citizens and their area, but one must also consider the ramifications of doing so.
Of course, starting school a couple of weeks earlier won’t cause riots in the streets, but with freedom comes responsibility, and it’s worth asking ourselves if we trust our local councils to disobey our state-level government.
The change needs to be made, and has been needing to be made for years. With exams now such a large part of a student’s academic life, schedules should work around exams, as shoving testing into existing calendars splits quarters and semesters into confusing and illogical timeframes. In the end, local counties know best when it comes to governing local education.
College, of course, follows no such restrictions. Wake Tech, for example, holds year round classes, and most traditional calendar universities begin classes within the first two weeks of August. For students taking college classes part-time, this can lead to confusing graduation scenarios in which you begin college classes during summer break or complete them weeks before graduation.
None of this means we should encourage breaking the law; change just needs to be done ethically and correctly.
Several bills have been passed in the N.C. House allowing for increased calendar flexibility for individual counties, but each and every one has died in the Senate. The more recent House Bill 115 promises the same thing, but it too is expected to stall.
The decision to follow the state law gives us another year of stability, but in 2025 we can expect the issue to rear its head again for 2026. Especially with Wake County’s recent quarrels over daily start times, school schedules are bound to change, and only time can tell how and when.
