Local officials should set the calendars in North Carolina's 114 districts. The legislature should get out of the business or, at the most, set only wide parameters for when the school year begins and ends.
But that is not the way the law reads. Instead, the legislature has set a start date that is far too late in the year for the state's western districts, one that almost assures a schedule scramble midway through a school year after bad weather interferes.
Western legislators recently told The Asheville Citizen-Times that they will try again to either repeal or amend a 2004 state law that forbids school from starting any earlier than Aug. 25 and ending no later than June 10. In between, districts must fit in 180 class days.
Neither sound educational policy nor research are behind the law. Business is. The state's real-estate and tourism industries want things this way.
Advocates of the law talk about "saving our summers" and the traditional family summer vacation. It's an appeal to nostalgia and convenience, not to the best educational interests of our children.
In 2004, educators tried to stop the law, but powerful political interests prevailed. Legislators put a bit of leeway into the bill, allowing districts to take limited exemptions to the law to plan for bad weather.
Those exemptions, however, are inadequate. Western districts are in a serious bind as they try to meet all of the state's calendar demands.
The result is likely to be a school schedule in which students lose some of their spring breaks. This is not only bad for traditional family spring vacations, it's also bad for education. Children need the occasional break to recharge their batteries. They are much better served by a long school year that includes a number of breaks.
Another solution for the snow days is the dreaded Saturday session. They are being scheduled, too. But these are often half-days that rob children of instructional time.
A long summer has also been shown to hurt education. Children leave school in early June and forget too much of what they learned the previous year. Teachers must then spend weeks of the new school year reviewing the previous year's lessons. Shorter summers don't cause this problem.
The legislature made a serious mistake in 2004, allowing the simplistic "Save Our Summers" special-interest campaign to trump what is best for the education of our children. Legislators should either repeal or fix the law this spring.
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