PENDER COUNTY — The Pender County Schools Board of Education decided to play the long game on Tuesday.
READ MORE: Pender Schools admin is pushing for an expanded, balanced calendar. It has a drawback.
The board adopted a calendar for the 2026-2027 school year that would violate a long-standing state statute if all things remain the same by next August. The calendar has a start date on Aug. 10, 2026, a full two weeks earlier than state law would allow, and ends on May 21. The calendar for the school year starting this August will follow state statute.
As lobbied for by businesses in the summer tourism industry, state law mandates school start on the Monday closest to Aug. 25. This results in about a week’s difference in calendars depending on where Aug. 25 falls that year.
The Pender County BOE’s decision to adopt the calendar was unanimous, but was not originally planned for the meeting. Board member Don Hall asked to amend the agenda and move the calendar issue from an information update to an action item, noting the board believed it had a draft that would satisfy most concerns.
The board put the calendar on the monitor as it prepared to vote toward the end of its open session. Hall absolved district employees of any involvement in creating the forbidden document.
“Please know this is the first time the staff has seen it,” he said.
Prior to the surprise vote, the district was collecting feedback from school committees to modify drafts that would follow the calendar law while adding about a week of school days. Superintendent Brad Breedlove never told the board to ignore the law and drafts created by staff followed it, but he made it clear in prior meetings the district’s ability to create a calendar that did everything was limited. Hall noted the calendar is two school years out and there will be time to resolve issues if they arise.
Board Chair Beth Burns said it was the first time she saw the draft as well. There was no other discussion on the issue before the vote. No one addressed the issue again until after the board spent nearly two hours in closed session.
“This was not something that was planned,” Hall said after the board exited the closed session. “It is something that was decided literally a couple of minutes before the meeting started. None of us had seen it before. None of us. To the best of my knowledge, none. I had not, Ms. Burns had not. Don’t know about the other two, don’t really know whose idea it was. It was a collaboration between the four. I want everyone to understand that.”
School board members did not agree to provide interviews on the issue, per district spokesperson Bob Fankboner.
Burns was the only board member who did not comment on the merits of the calendar at the meeting.
The other members pointed out the calendar managed to accomplish everything parents asked for and what they believe is in the best interest of students: The semesters have a balanced number of days, with the first semester ending prior to winter break. It also aligns well with the community college schedule, increases the number of instructional days and spaces out teacher workdays rather than cramming them into blocks at the beginning and end of the semesters.
“I’m here for the children. I don’t care about anything else,” board member Tom Reeves said. “I’m here for them. They needed more instructional hours. They got that. You parents who was raising cane and just raising hell with us, yes you got the December testing like you wanted. So I don’t see why anybody would go against this calendar. I mean, what is the problem? I think some people out there, it don’t matter what calendar we came up with, you’re not going to be happy. So we did what was best for the kids.”
Reeves noted the district wants to eventually get back to 185 instructional days, even more than the 174 instructional days in the 2026 calendar.
District staff proposed the draft calendars would have only accomplished increasing the number of instructional days by a week, even out the days in each semester at the expense of pushing first-semester testing to January and affect alignment with Cape Fear Community College.
About 30 of North Carolina’s 115 school districts have adopted calendars which simply ignore a start date requirement enshrined in state law. The number ebbs and flows as some districts add their names to the list and others back off in the wake of new leadership, pushback or lawsuits.
The New Hanover County Board of Education openly considered breaking the law in 2023 as it was trying to cobble together a plan for its upcoming school year, but backed off. It faced similar problems as the Pender County board: There would be no way to follow the law and achieve everything the district wanted.
A common, yet broad justification of districts defying the state is the law hamstrings what districts can do with their calendars, does not benefit students and is kept in place at the behest of the state’s tourism lobby.
The General Assembly has acknowledged these points and that the law is unpopular. From the summary of a 2017 report from the legislature’s Program Evaluation Division:
“The school calendar law currently satisfies the travel and tourism industry preference for a summer break that includes most of August, which is why these stakeholders prefer the current law be maintained. Organizations representing education interests want more school calendar flexibility and prefer that summer break ends in early August because this schedule would allow high school exams to be scheduled before winter break and also allows alignment with the community college calendar. Public opinion favors local control of the school calendar.”
There is no state enforcement mechanism for the law, but districts can be sued by private parties in an attempt to move their calendars back in line with the law. A notable test case happened last summer, when Carteret County Schools lost a suit over its own calendar violations.
The suit was brought by district parents who also own local businesses that benefit from tourism in the county. The district planned to appeal the decision, but dropped it before a state-level precedent could be set.
North Carolina is one of about a dozen states which dictate a start date for schools, and one of two which also prescribe a cut off date for the year. Legislative efforts to relax the calendar rules have failed repeatedly. The House has repeatedly passed bills, which die in the more conservative Senate.
There are a few new bills on file this year: a bipartisan House bill and a Senate bill with only a handful of Democrats signed on as sponsors, with the sarcastic short-hand title “Make NC School Calendars Great Again.”
A House bill specifically for Pender County, filed by Rep. Carson Smith, would push the county’s start date back one week and allow the board to modify its end date.
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