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Wake County students will have a weekly scheduled day off more than a third of the time next school year, creating what some call a “fragmented school calendar.”
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Wake County traditional-calendar students are only scheduled to have a full, five-day school week 64% of the time for the 2026-27 school year, according to Anna Egalite, a professor at N.C. State and an education researcher. Egalite is warning that the inclusion of so many teacher workdays during the school year could impact student learning and cause hardships for families.
“It just creates this monthly problem for parents to work out,” Egalite said in an interview with The News & Observer. “It’s on a random weekday, it’s hard to book a babysitter on a Tuesday, so I think that the effects are unequally felt.”
It’s a trend that could increase over time. Wake County’s traditional-calendar schools — which educate most of the district’s 160,000 students — are scheduled to have 25 five-day school weeks in the 2026-27 school year. It’s scheduled to drop to 23 weeks in the 2027-28 school year.
Wake could increase the number of five-day school weeks. But school officials say it would cause issues such as not honoring community requests for days off and result in extended periods before students and teachers get breaks.
Egalite is the parent of two Wake County students, so the frequent number of shortened school weeks caused her to look deeper at Wake’s calendar. She published her findings earlier this month in an article in Education Next.
Egalite found that Wake has more workdays during the school year than any of the nation’s five largest school districts: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami-Dade and Clark County in Nevada.
Wake adopts calendars years ahead of time to give families and school employees time to prepare. But Egalite questioned how many students are left alone at home on the days when Wake has workdays.
“There are certainly kids in Wake County that I worry about,” Egalite said. “How are they spending the day? Is it enriching? Is it well supervised?”
A calendar committee consisting of teachers, parents, principals, administrators and community members develops proposed schedules for all of Wake’s different school calendars. Wake is not one of the North Carolina school districts defying the state’s school calendar law.
Wake tries to schedule 10 of its 17 teacher workdays during the school year. The other seven occur before and after the last day of classes.
Some workdays are at the end of academic quarters to give teachers time to input student grades on report cards. Other workdays are used for training and as weather makeup days.
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Some workdays are held on religious holidays. Wake also tries to schedule workdays on election days because so many schools are used as polling sites.
“While I understand it is difficult for working parents, me being one of them, when they are not in school, we cannot consider school a daycare,” Catherine Hale said in a Facebook comment. “With larger class sizes and less funding, I support the teacher workdays. They need them.”
Hale was among the commenters who supported having so many teacher workdays in a Raleigh Downtown Community group Facebook post created by Egalite.
“Professional time is important and planning time is important, but I just think we should have a discussion about how much and when,” Egalite said.
Wake could have increased the number of five-day school weeks for the 2027-28 school year. But the school board rejected that option earlier this year.
School board vice chair Sam Hershey had asked staff to develop an option that prioritizes the number of five-day school weeks for traditional-calendar schools.
“I noticed on the year-round calendar that we have a lot of weeks where five days, five days, five days, five days and then we turn to the traditional calendar and we have a lot of four-day school weeks,” Hershey said at the March 18 work session. “And that doesn’t include the weather stuff that we have to deal with and that puts a lot of stress on families.”
An alternative calendar developed by staff would have had 27 five-day school weeks — four more full school weeks than the calendar ultimately adopted by the board. It created more five-day school weeks by:
The proposed calendar would have no scheduled days off in February and only one scheduled day off in September, October, April and May. Tamani Anderson Powell, the administrator who works with the district’s calendar committee, said that would have gone against the district’s practice of having at least one scheduled off day per month.
Anderson Powell also said that teachers didn’t like having too many workdays scheduled outside of the instructional year. She said having workdays then doesn’t always best support learning and teaching.
“After discussion, the Board of Education decided to approve the calendar that includes more teacher workdays throughout the instructional year to recognize academic needs, as well as some community requests,” Anderson Powell said in a message to The N&O.
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