Alamance-Burlington school board members are scheduled at their upcoming work session Tuesday afternoon to discuss the possibility of starting the next, 2025-26 school year about two weeks earlier than what the state’s school calendar currently allows.
ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming told school board members at their meeting prior to the Christmas holiday that the administration had sent out a calendar survey, asking ABSS parents and students about their preferences for beginning and ending the school year.
“About a third of school districts in North Carolina are headed toward an earlier start,” Fleming told school board members on December 2, adding that a discussion would be placed on the agenda for their January 14 work session.
In addition to asking respondents about their relationship to ABSS (parent, student, etc.), the survey asked whether they preferred to start school between one and 14 days earlier than the law currently allows and end the school year before Memorial Day, or whether they preferred sticking with the start and end dates mandated by state law.
[Story continues below special subscription offer.]
MORE ABSS NEWS, MORE LOCAL NEWS – EVERY WEEK than you’ll find anywhere else. AND at a better rate than you’ll find anywhere else: $50 for one year, $89 for two. (And if you’re in Alamance County, those prices include a print edition by mail, as well.) Subscribe now.
The survey garnered a total of 1,665 responses, ABSS chief communications officer Emily-Lynn Adkins told The Alamance News Wednesday.
Of those, 1,144 respondents favored starting the next school year about two weeks earlier, around August 14, 2025, and ending the school year on May 23, 2026, or about two weeks earlier than the date outlined in the state’s school calendar law, Adkins explained for the newspaper.
North Carolina’s school calendar law – passed by the General Assembly in 2004 and intended to boost the state’s tourism industry – prohibits all traditional K-12 public school systems from starting the school year before the Monday closest to August 26 and from ending the school year later than the Friday closest to June 11.
By comparison, 521 respondents said they favored following the existing statewide school calendar law, Adkins said Wednesday. For 2025-26, the school year would begin no earlier than Monday, August 25 and end no later than Friday, June 12, 2026, based on the requirements in the school calendar law.
The law does not apply to charter schools, early colleges, or to K-12 schools that follow a year-round calendar, which ABSS eliminated several years ago at the recommendation of then-superintendent Dr. Bruce Benson.
“I think there was conversation to see if there was a desire [to start and end the school year earlier],” school board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves elaborated in a recent interview with The Alamance News. “I know it was on the N.C. School Boards Association’s legislative agenda to provide school districts more authority.”
In fact, Alamance County’s state house representatives have previously filed local bills that would’ve granted ABSS more flexibility with the school calendar, but those bills were sent to committees, where they languished without action. Alamance County’s legislative delegation and county commissioners are scheduled to meet jointly with the school board at 8:30 a.m. Monday, January 13, at the ABSS Central Office in Burlington.
The public school systems in Union and Carteret counties have recently faced legal action over their attempts to defy the school calendar law.
Carteret County’s school system initially appealed a judge’s ruling in June 2024 that nullified the calendar its board had adopted – which would’ve started the current school year on August 13, 2024 – but later withdrew the appeal, based on multiple news reports.
For the 2024-25 school year, 29 of the state’s 115 school boards voted to set their own calendars – starting earlier and ending earlier than state law allows – which represented an increase from 15 school boards in North Carolina that had voted to do so during the previous 2023-24 school year, multiple media outlets have reported.
“It would be ideal to align the public school calendars with [those for] higher education,” Ellington-Graves said in the interview. For example, the 16 UNC system universities began their current academic year on August 19, 2024, about a week before the state’s K-12 public schools.
“We’re getting ready to start looking at the new calendar, and Dr. Fleming wants to know where this community stands with calendar options,” the school board chairman added. “”If the community has no interest, the conversations with [state legislators] would not be necessary. [There’s also] interest across the state to get exams finished before the [Christmas and New Year’s] holidays.”
