I just read that the Wake County Public School System is proposing to change two elementary schools from year-round to traditional calendar schedules. This comes after changing two middle schools from year-round to traditional calendar last year. In all cases, the decision has to do with underenrollment.
My own children were enrolled in year-round multi-track schools in Wake County and while I would have much preferred they be on a traditional calendar, we didn’t have much choice. When we moved into our subdivision, an older neighbor warned us that you can only argue so much with the monster that is WCPSS, and she was right.
Knowing what I know, about WCPSS and about the year-round schools, I would argue that it is well beyond time for the school system to admit that its year round experiment is a failed one.
WCPSS began opening schools on a year-round calendar some fifteen years ago as a solution to the expected population growth in Raleigh and the surrounding towns. With four “tracks,” one of which was on a three-week break at any given time, the idea was a school could handle more students through the year than would be possible with a traditional calendar schedule. But … they didn’t implement the year-round calendar across all of the schools. Only some.
This led to a county-wide school system in which some of the schools were year-round, some were traditional, high schools were always traditional because of sports, and new charter schools were opening every year that ran on either a year-round calendar, a traditional calendar, or a modified calendar. Think about the logistics nightmare this created within a central office who could never seem to manage the complexities of the situation.
This multitude of calendars means the school transportation department, already short-staffed, is presented with increased expenses and challenges. Buses are on the road at all times of the day, bus drivers are harder to come by because no one wants to run routes all day, especially for the meager wages the schools system pays.
The multitude of calendars also means that, within a neighborhood, there are never many kids available to play, because the kids in the neighborhood are on all different calendars, depending on what track they’re put into. Goodbye to traditional summer vacations and kids playing outside all day. Hello to three-week structured summer camps at a cost of $1000+ per week. Working parents love this. For stay-at-homes, it’s kind of sad. Heck, for all of the kids it’s sad … and lonely.
In addition to all of the logistical chaos, WCPSS is constantly shutting down or otherwise juggling tracks. If one of the tracks in a school’s four-track schedule is underenrolled, WCPSS shuts it down and forces all of the students on that track schedule to move to another one. Not at all disruptive to kids, parents, and teachers!
Fast forward to 2025, and little by little, WCPSS is transitioning various year-round schools back to traditional for good, because the enrollment numbers they expected never materialized. So, whoever is doing the forecasting at WCPSS isn’t doing a necessarily good job. And we can also thank the North Carolina State legislature, Republican gerrymandered that it is, for all of the charter schools and the religious based schools that have drawn enrollment away. Because, you know, parents must have a choice to eschew the standard model of education at the expense of all the kids who didn’t win the charter lotteries.
Few other schools in the country operate on a year-round schedule. In the end, it’s pretty much a novelty undertaken at the expense of our kids and their parents, that simply hasn’t panned out to prove successful. It hasn’t resulted in an exceptional education system – student performance in Wake County is still average at best. All it’s done is add time and money to the operation of an already bloated admininstration that has never been able to prove it can implement year-round successfully.
Right now, WCPSS is evaluating schools on an individual basis in its recommendations for a calendar change. But really, it’s time for WCPSS to acknowledge that they failed with their year-round experiment. I’m not counting on them to ever admit to that, so the least they could do is just ditch this awful experiment for good.
surviving nc 