State house representatives Dennis Riddell and Steve Ross – both Republicans whose legislative districts include portions of Alamance County – filed a bill on Wednesday that would give the Alamance-Burlington school system the flexibility to set its own school calendar, beginning with the 2025-26 school year. That authoring would be dependent on whether the bill passes the house and senate and is signed into law by Gov. Josh Stein.
Republican state senator Amy Galey, who represents Alamance County and part of Randolph County, criticized ABSS earlier this month for conducting a survey that asked ABSS parents, students, and staff about their preferences for beginning and ending the 2025-26 school year (see related story, this edition).
ABSS officials pointed out during an initial discussion in December, and several subsequent discussions, that approximately one-third of the state’s 115 public school systems adopted calendars for the current, 2024-25 school year that have earlier start and end dates, based on a report that the state Department of Public Instruction submitted to the General Assembly in June 2024.
During the joint meeting with county and school officials on January 13, Galey warned that local school officials can’t unilaterally buck the school calendar law.
“I think it’s an absolute disgrace that school boards across the state have implemented calendars in violation of that law,” the state senator opined. “You have to look at yourself in the mirror and remind yourself that you violated your oath of office when you voted to adopt a policy that you know is in violation of the law.”
Current school board member Dan Ingle, a former Republican representative in the state house, challenged Galey’s summation about the school calendar survey.
“When you send out a questionnaire asking what you think of a policy, that’s not a violation of the law,” Ingle told Galey during the joint meeting. “No law has been violated, senator Galey, by sending out a questionnaire.”
“I think it’s unwise,” Galey responded, “and it’s ultimately irrelevant.”
For the 2024-25 school year, 29 school boards adopted school calendars with earlier start and end dates than state law currently allows.
The Carteret County school board was sued over the calendar it had adopted for 2024-25; and its calendar with earlier start and end dates was nullified by a judge in June 2024. Carteret County’s school board later adopted a statutorily-compliant calendar for the current school year.
Two other school boards, in Union and Hyde counties, voluntarily rescinded their calendars with earlier start dates in 2023 and 2024, respectively, after they were threatened with lawsuits for defying the state law.
The General Assembly convened the 2025 session Wednesday.
Riddell and Ross have previously filed local bills – that only applied to ABSS – that ultimately failed to restore the school board’s authority to set its calendars for each school year. The previous bills later died in committee.
North Carolina public school officials have consistently complained about the stringent parameters of the current calendar law ever since it took effect.
Current and former ABSS school board members have said that restoring local control over the calendar would: enable students to take fall semester exams before Christmas, rather than in mid-January of each year; mitigate learning loss over the weeks-long Christmas break; and enable ABSS to synchronize its academic calendar with that of Alamance Community College, where many high school students are simultaneously enrolled in ACC courses.
The school calendar law prohibits North Carolina’s 115 traditional K-12 public school systems from starting each school year before the Monday closest to August 26 and ending no later than the Friday closest to June 11. N.C. public charter schools and private schools are not required to abide by that law.
The current law had been sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of state legislators during the 2003-04
session. But former Democratic state senator Marc Basnight – who served 13 terms, including nine as senate president pro tem – had long been considered the law’s architect, as he sought to boost tourism in the eight Outer Banks counties he represented until his retirement in 2011.
Current senate pro tem Phil Berger, a Rockingham County Republican, has previously said he sees no need to change the school calendar law, based on a June 2024 report from The (Raleigh) News & Observer, as well as an earlier report from the nonpartisan education policy research organization EdNC.
