Local boards know best on school calendars

Editorial by Durham Herald-Sun, November 22, 2014.

The N. C. General Assembly’s passion in the past decade to micromanage school calendars stands among the most bone-headed of decisions.

Ostensibly to help protect some nebulous concept of family summer-vacation time, but in reality at the bidding of the moneyed tourism interests who ferociously lobbied for the restrictions, the legislators decreed that public school classes can start no earlier than the Monday closest to Aug. 26 and end no later than the Friday closest to June 11.

There is no demonstrable or imaginable reason for this based on what’s best for teaching children. Indeed, the weight of evidence clearly argues for a calendar that eschews the traditional three-month summer break altogether in favor of more frequent, shorter breaks throughout the calendar year. Such a year-round program is available as an option in Durham and many other school districts.

Schools follow the traditional calendar that they do because a century or more ago most students’ lives were tied in large part to farms and the agricultural cycle. Summer was the busiest time in the fields and all hands were needed until crops were harvested.

But that has long since ceased to be a meaningful factor in most districts, especially the urban ones throughout the state.

Now, school districts are pushing back against those calendar restrictions. This past week, the Durham Public Schools board adopted a resolution asking lawmakers to return the control of the calendar to local school districts. That move is part of the N. C. School Board Association’s legislative agenda.

“Local boards of education are best equipped to understand the unique local conditions that need to be examined and balanced to ensure a school calendar maximizes student learning,” the school boards group says in its position paper on the issue.

“Local boards in low-income communities that want to experiment with longer school years to close the achievement gap, or boards that want to change their calendars to reflect changing community demographics, now have very limited ability to do so,” the paper says.

In Durham, for example, the board would like to move the start date up so the first semester would end at winter break. And as school board Chairwoman Heidi Carter put it, “a number of our high schools need to be on the same schedule as the community college because our students are taking classes there, too.”

By contrast, some rural districts may, indeed, want to take the agriculture cycle into account.

The legislative majority these days professes to believe in less centralization of government (except, of course, when it doesn’t). The school calendar would be an excellent place to honor that belief.

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/editorials/x205867644/Local-boards-know-best-on-calendar