What Happens If Your School District Starts Too Early? Not A Damn Thing?
Every once in a while, you come across a story that explains why something just feels, I don’t know, a bit off.
This month, that story was a piece written by Will Doran of WRAL that explained something simple but profound: Why North Carolina’s schools start so late in August. The reason: BIG TOURISM.
The school calendar law dates back to 2004, when a group called Save our Summers teamed up with the state’s tourism industry to ask lawmakers to ban school officials from starting the school year any earlier than the last week of August. They said earlier start dates were cutting into family vacation time and hurting vacation rentals on the coast.
At the time, school leaders objected, but then-Rep. Connie Wilson, R-Mecklenburg, said it was a matter of balance.
"We have extreme flexibility for the school districts. We’re just asking one little thing – be a team player for the families and the economy of North Carolina," Wilson said at a 2004 news conference.
Ever wonder why your school tends to start the week before Labor Day? This is why.
The problem, increasingly, is that this calendar doesn’t sync up with community colleges. Plus, summer tends to be a free-for-all when it comes to child care, there’s the whole learning loss thing, and so on. So yeah, there are reasons why schools might want to start earlier than the laws allow.
Which, uh, many of them are anyway. At least eight districts started early this year. Why? The same law that sets the calendar is also missing any sort of consequences for districts who break it. One option: You can just sue your local school board if they decide to start early. That’s what happened in Union County. The district ultimately decided to go back to the later, technically legal start date in late August.
The law itself seems to be the source of a rare difference of opinion between the two most powerful men in the state legislature. House Speaker Tim Moore told WRAL that he’d like to change the law to give districts more flexibility. Senate leader Phil Berger said the law should stay the way it is. Either way, though, there’s no way to actually force districts to follow it, so the Save our Summers folks are relying on an Old-School Parent Move, the “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” maneuver:
Save Our Summers President Louise Lee said she was disappointed school systems would break state law. "This one in particular hits hard," she said, "because it sends this message to students of all ages — we can get away with disregarding this law, so we’re going to do it. Trust that has been placed in education leaders has crumbled."
Awww, Your Grid Is Soooooo Cute
Speaking of beach things! How bad would the power outages be if a hurricane hit Shallotte? In one neighborhood, the power might not go out at all.
Heron’s Nest, home to 54 people in Brunswick County, is North Carolina’s first microgrid. The New York Times checked it out earlier this month:
At Heron’s Nest, the 62-kilowatt solar system and 255-kilowatt-hour battery are maintained by the local utility, Brunswick Electric Membership Corporation. Homeowners get a monthly energy credit on their utility bills by signing an interconnection agreement with the utility, which controls their hot-water heaters and thermostats when there’s high power demand. If the local power grid is stressed and the utility believes a power outage is necessary, residents here will be able to keep their lights on.
Solar panels can be pretty resilient in the face of bad storms. Last year, a solar-powered community of 5,000 people in Florida took a direct hit from Hurricane Ian. Not one of them lost electricity.
The Sum Of All Water Bottle Fears
Costco was selling a UNC-Greensboro water bottle with a “HBCU pride” logo on it. One teensy problem: UNCG is not a historically Black institution. North Carolina A&T and Bennett College are. This showed up in a since-deleted TikTok video a few weeks back, and there’s a screengrab here if you want to see what this looked like.
Nobody’s saying how this happened, exactly, although it seems like an innocent mixup by someone who’s not from ‘round here. Still, people get really hyped up whenever there’s some sort of mistake that involves UNCG and A&T. Per the Greensboro News & Record:
There have always been concerns among the A&T faithful that there would be an effort to merge the two schools, a worry that initially manifested itself when UNCG changed its primary school color from green to blue, matching the Aggie scheme. The bottle mistake fanned that flame again.
Brandon remembers how his father reacted when he saw that UNCG has changed its colors on a water tower.
"I remember when I was a kid riding down the street and my dad slamming on the brakes, and go into the payphone and calling people once he realized that UNCG tower changed from green and gold to blue and gold," he said. "So, we have some trauma on this."
The story does say that UNC leaders are again assuring people that there is no merger in the works. Even so, this is the worst UNCG mixup since a student moved from Australia to Greensboro for college because he didn’t know there was a difference between UNC-Greensboro and UNC-Chapel Hill.