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Under protest, the Wake County school system will let students miss an hour of school each week to attend Bible classes or other off-campus religious instruction.
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The Wake County school board gave final approval on Tuesday to policy changes that will allow students to be excused from school for one hour per week of religious instruction. The off-campus religious instruction provision was mandated by Republican lawmakers in this year’s state budget “to help build the moral and religious character of our students.”
School board member Lynn Edmonds said they need to comply with the new state law. But Edmonds said the law should be repealed.
“It does not support teaching and learning,” Edmonds said. “As I said at the last meeting, our charge is to educate students. We cannot do that if students are not in school.”
The policy change comes as Christian groups such as LifeWise Academy have been expanding operations in North Carolina. The Ohio-based nonprofit provides Bible education and character-focused classes to public school students during regular school hours.
LifeWise says it has three active chapters in North Carolina with 120 more planned, including one near Willow Springs Elementary in southern Wake.
School board member Cheryl Caulfield said that partnership with groups such as LifeWise can help students engage with the community.
“Those kinds of mentor relationships outside of school, sometimes that engages them back in our schools and makes them succeed in other ways,” Caulfield said in an interview after the meeting.
The final vote was 6-1. Board members Wing Ng and Toshiba Rice, who had both voted for the policy on Sept. 1, were absent Tuesday.
“It’s state law,” said board chair Tyler Swanson. “Our oaths require us unfortunately to comply with state and federal law even if there may be some inconsistencies.”
Board member Jennifer Job was the lone dissenter. Job called the religious time exemption unconstitutional.
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“This is the definition of privileging religion over non-religion,” said Job, who is Jewish. “This is also because of who is behind this law and who is backing it financially, this is privileging a certain religion over other religions.”
Currently, public schools are only allowed to teach about religion in a non-devotional way. Religion can be discussed in class as history and literature.
But now under state law, students can miss class to attend religious instruction if:
“It’s constitutionally wrong that the legislature is pushing a Christian nationalism indoctrination agenda,” the Rev. Suzanne Parker Miller, executive director of Pastors for NC Children, told the board during public comment on Tuesday.
Her group has been vocal in opposing allowing LIfeWise into North Carolina schools.
Wake is putting its own limits on how often and when students can use the religious instruction exemption.
The new state law requires schools to adopt policies allowing students to miss between one and four hours per week. Wake is going with the minimum of one hour per week.
At the request of board vice chair Sam Hershey, the policy was revised on Tuesday to say that the hour per week includes transportation time.
Wake will also prevent students from being excused for religious instruction if they’ll miss state-required tests, screenings or other assessments, or state-required remedial instruction, interventions or retesting.
Hershey also proposed Tuesday that students who leave for religious classes must hand in any work due that school day. That was nixed after board attorney Rod Malone raised concerns that it could treat these students differently from peers who also get excused absences.
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This story was originally published September 15, 2026 at 8:21 PM.