While North Carolina’s coastal tourism industry celebrates legislation that extends the summer vacation season by preventing public schools from opening before Aug. 25 and closing after June 10, school boards and advocates around the state are angry at what they view as a quest for cash at the expense of students.
“It’s steamrolling right over logic,” said Roger Aiken, chairman of the Buncombe County Board of Education. “We shouldn’t be letting tourism run schools.” Aiken’s board is one of 82 of the state’s 115 school districts that opposed House Bill 1464 by filing resolutions or letters with the N.C. School Boards Association, which lobbied against it. Even more were opposed but didn’t put their opinion in writing, according to Leanne Winner, the NCSBA’s director of governmental relations.
Once Gov. Mike Easley signs the bill into law, it takes effect for the 2005-2006 school year. The law lengthens summer break for traditional schools by eliminating five teacher workdays, the non-instruction days teachers use for training, preparing lesson plans, assessing student needs, and meeting with parents. Now there will be 15, not 20. The number of student instruction days will remain at 180. Districts whose schools have been closed for weather or emergencies for eight or more days in any four of the past 10 years will be eligible for a waiver. More than 20 are expected to qualify. Year-round schools are exempt.
By enacting the law, North Carolina would become only the eighth state to deny local education agencies the freedom to determine their start date, according to the Education Commission of the States, a clearinghouse for education data. The loss of local control is at the heart of Aiken’s frustration. He thinks each district is different and the local school board best understands its community’s needs. The law is symptomatic of a troubling trend toward making decisions in Raleigh, he said.
You’ll get no argument from John Poteat, director of policy research at the North Carolina Public School Forum. “What’s especially frustrating is that the one-size-fits-all approach generally doesn’t work well,” he said. There also hasn’t been enough discussion about the impact on student achievement, and that doesn’t make sense, he said, in light of strict accountability standards in the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government’s 2002 education law.
Aiken is concerned about the effect on the 65 percent of high schools that use block scheduling. The law will force students to return after the holiday break to take exams on material they haven’t studied for several weeks. Seniors who want to start college in the spring will have to postpone plans since they will not have completed high schools finals. He regrets the law will work against these motivated students.
It’s the negative impact on kids with disabilities that most bothers Dr. James McKethan, who retired this year as executive director for Exceptional Children’s Programs for Cumberland County Schools. His experience shows teacher workdays are a critical tool in developing innovative teaching methods needed to educate kids with special needs, and for meeting the NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress goals for these students. “Without those days, we’ll lose the time to focus on training and strategies on this,” he said. “I’ve been around a while and I go back to the time when teacher organizations wanted more time and development.”
McKethan said it’s clear teachers’ work won’t decrease, and he predicts they will have to work after class when they’re tired and less effective, or be replaced by a substitute during the day. The father of two handicapped kids, McKethan planned to testify to the General Assembly, but the time limit for discussion of the bill prevented him from outlining his concerns. “This will compromise the academic achievement of kids with disabilities,” he said of reducing teacher workdays.
Having worked 36 years as a teacher, principal, and human resources director, John Guard, a Chowan County Board of Education member, thinks teachers will be hurt as well. NCLB mandates that teachers be highly qualified in the subjects they teach and workdays help make improvement possible, he said. Guard’s opposition to the changes could have been awkward since Rep. Bill Culpepper, who represents the county, was a primary sponsor of the House bill. But, Guard understands Culpepper’s position and harbors no hard feelings.
“I respect him. He also represents Dare, which is highly dependent on tourism,” Guard said. Still, he wondered how people would react if someone introduced a bill to close school for a month in the winter to support the ski season in western North Carolina. “It may sound ludicrous but it’s the same thing. They bring in millions, too,” he said, unconvinced the benefit to coastal tourism justifies the action.
Even though teachers will work five fewer days, they will maintain their current salaries. The net result is a 2.33 percent pay raise for more than 95,000 teachers, assistant principals, and instructional support staff paid from the teachers’ salary schedule. The price tag of the lost productivity is more than $89 million, according to legislative fiscal analysts. Other state employees don’t receive increase in pay rate. John Dornan, executive director of the Public School Forum, is more than surprised at the salary inequity. “If there isn’t a discriminatory lawsuit, I would be shocked,” he said. CJ attempted to get comment from Dana Cope, executive director of the State Employees Association of North Carolina, but he didn’t respond to requests.
There are other financial impacts related to teachers’ use of vacation days. The state could incur additional annual liability of $7 million to $11.8 million—the payable value of unused vacation days if teachers leave the system. Substitute teacher costs are also likely to rise, at an annual additional cost of $5.4 million to $10.8 million. The impact on retirement benefits is unclear. If fewer vacation days are used under the new calendar, more unused days will potentially be applied to retirement. Assembly actuaries determined the cost isn’t quantifiable because there are so many variables.
Aiken thinks the Assembly didn’t carefully study the law’s impact before passing it. Buncombe County Schools would have gladly participated in a review, he said. Instead, the coastal tourism agenda drove the discussion and got their way, he said. That doesn’t surprise him. He’s convinced the area west of Charlotte has less political clout and doesn’t receive enough attention. Regardless, he is surprised the original House bill passed. “I never thought it would get out of committee,” he said.
Mayor Sherry Rollason of Kill Devil Hills thinks her town will see more tourists because of the calendar change. In the summer, the Dare County town’s population surges from 6,500 to 40,000 or 50,000 per week. She says it is true that the number of vacationers dips once schools open. Dare County schools once tried to counteract the effect by postponing their start date until after Labor Day, she recalled, but it didn’t work because neighboring counties didn’t join in. She sees the statewide mandate as a good compromise for everyone. “I didn’t hear opposition or complaints,” she said of conversations she had last October with mayors at a League of Municipalities meeting. “They were pushing it,” she said.
Donna Martinez is associate editor of Carolina Journal.