Make N.C. snow days great again
Let's stop pretending remote learning works. Fix the law and let kids enjoy the snow.
North Carolina’s school calendar laws have been a mess for years.
I was in high school when the 2004 law went into effect that required school districts to start classes at the end of August rather than earlier in the month.
It was designed to encourage more beach vacations. But it also had the effect of pushing mid-year exams until after winter break, which has been a bane of N.C. high schoolers ever since. For that very reason, fully 1 in 4 school districts in North Carolina do not obey the school calendar law at this point.
The General Assembly has been pressured to change those rules in recent years, but hasn’t taken up the issue. Our legislature has, however, fiddled around the edges — particularly when it comes to bad weather make-up days.
Since there hadn’t been snow in most of North Carolina for a long time, it hasn’t been much of an issue. But with two snow events in the Piedmont in the last two weeks, parents are just now finding out that the laws have gotten even messier.
A brief primer on snow day rules
State law requires school districts to have either 185 days of schooling or 1,025 hours of instruction. Most districts go the latter route — scheduling something like 175 days of school to get to a total of roughly 1,060 hours.
For decades, when bad weather hit — like a hurricane in the fall or snow in the winter — school would be cancelled and then districts could choose to schedule a make-up day or simply call it off entirely. Scheduling more than the required hours gave them that flexibility, for a small handful of days.
More often than not, school districts would go ahead and schedule a make-up day on a teacher workday just in case.
Enter COVID-19. With schools shut down, the General Assembly created remote instruction laws to let students continue school from home. As students returned to the classroom in the 2021-22 school year, a new law gave districts the flexibility to designate remote learning days for bad weather.
Initially, this flexibility was only for the 2021-22 school year. But the legislature soon followed up to make it permanent.
Under the revised law, school districts now have the ability to designate up to five “remote learning” days — that still count toward the required school year.
I don’t think it’s working as intended
Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen North Carolina school districts do exactly that. With last week’s snow, dozens of school districts opted for a remote learning day.
Perhaps some school districts have the system dialed in, but my experience in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools leads me to believe that it’s not going that well.
School districts are supposed to file a “remote learning plan” with the state Department of Public Instruction if they plan to take advantage of this law. A cursory look at these plans will show you that they’re not really plans at all. Here’s Mecklenburg’s “plan,” and here’s Union County’s.
CMS has a bit more details on their guidelines in this “expectations” document, but it still leaves quite a bit to be desired.
In most cases, students are just getting sent home with a worksheet that takes a few minutes to complete.
Just give the kids a snow day
We learned pretty quickly during the COVID-19 lockdowns that remote learning doesn’t involve much learning at all. When it’s a one-off day in the middle of winter, the results are even worse.
I’m not opposed to keeping remote learning as a last-resort option in truly terrible circumstances. But for minor weather events, let’s ditch them.
Let’s stop pretending that they’re getting a school day in. Change the law to require special clearance to offer a remote learning day that counts toward the instructional hour requirement.
And let the kids play in the snow.
Quick hits
Elections have consequences, and it sure looks like the election of President Donald Trump is yielding positive ones for western North Carolina. In his inaugural address, Trump decried a poor federal response to Hurricane Helene in our state and pledged to fix it. Within hours, reports started emerging of FEMA working for new housing options. Trump also tapped a Navy Seal veteran with deep North Carolina ties as the interim director of the agency. They both visited western North Carolina on Friday, where Trump promised “significant” federal aid that doesn’t go through FEMA and to send the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild roads and bridges.
Former Gov. Pat McCrory’s group RightCount has put down about $50,000 to broadcast a TV ad in the Triangle and Charlotte criticizing Judge Jefferson Griffin’s attempts to challenge his election loss. You can see the video here. It’ll air primarily between today and Friday. The group backs voter ID, paper ballots and voting machines not connected to the internet, and generally praises the changes the General Assembly has made to voting laws.
My piece Friday about the urgency of the AI issue for North Carolina got a lot of thoughtful responses. One theme was on defending the value of liberal arts education, since I mentioned most four-years humanities degrees becoming worthless. I agree that in an ideal world, a four-year liberal arts degree should train up people who know how to think and how to be nimble. And I’m on board with the classical model of education for its own sake. I just don’t think our university system is delivering this in most cases.
Behind the paywall
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Important reads
Farley, Boliek slash DEI from NC government agencies following Trump order (Carolina Journal)
The Reading Wars Go to College (The Assembly)
NRCC chief [Richard Hudson] digs in for midterms: ’The math is in our favor’ (Politico)
Lumbee Tribe on path for full federal recognition (Carolina Journal)
Top spenders on social media this week
Question of the week
Last week, I asked you if you were planning to head to a political party county organizational meeting in the next few weeks. Mecklenburg County GOP’s is coming up, which is why it was on my mind. I was honestly a bit surprised to see that 44% of you said yes. That’s fantastic, and hats off to you for being engaged.
This week, I want to ask you about primary elections. Carolina Journal had an interesting piece advocating for moving back to a 40% threshold in an initial election to avoid a runoff. A few years back, it got lowered to 30%.
I think I agree with the move, though runoff elections do have weird dynamics that advantage the better-funded candidate.