Wake school board approves calendar changes at 8 schools but keeps all year-round

Calendars will soon change at eight of the Wake County Public School System's year-round schools, but not as much as originally proposed.

That's because the school board decided against recommendations to move four of the schools to traditional August-to-June calendars.

Parents in Holly Springs and Wake Forest objected to traditional calendars. They said year-round benefits their children and that they picked their schools because of it, and they wanted to keep some form of it.

The Wake County school board voted on Tuesday night to keep all of them year-round, but without a complex system that tracks students in and out over 12 months to expand the schools' capacities. Instead, all of the students will go to school at the same time as each other.

“I hope this shows that we are hearing you,” said Board Member Cheryl Caulfield, who represents Wake Forest. Caulfield said she understands how ingrained year-round schooling is in the community and how valued it is.

The board made a similar move last year, after the school system recommended some multi-track year-round elementary schools move to a traditional calendar, instead voting to make the schools single-track year-round at the request of many parents.

The changes approved Tuesday were made because the eight schools aren't projected to enroll as many students as their more flexible calendars were designed to allow.

The district is looking to cut unnecessary costs and ease logistical challenges for scheduling and transportation. Many of the original recommendations for traditional calendars, officials said, would have aligned more calendars between elementary and middle schools.

Heritage Elementary and Heritage Middle schools in Wake Forest, originally proposed to move to traditional calendars, don't have a capacity problem, parents said Tuesday, also noting that they disagreed with including the temporary trailers used as classrooms as a part of capacity.

"We have a boundary problem," parent Megan Bradley said. Growth is coming in the Wake Forest and Rolesville area, she and other parents said.

The eight schools are all currently on multi-track year-round calendars, meaning they rotate up to four groups --- called tracks --- of students in and out over a 12-month period, instead of 10 months, allowing more students to be enrolled than the building would otherwise allow.

Those calendars are costlier to operate because they require staffing and other costs for two more months out of the year.

Single-track year-round calendars are similar to traditional calendar schools in that students all attend at once, but they differ in that students attend over an extended period of time, tracking in for nine weeks and then taking three weeks off. Those are a schedule preference that don't expand a school's capacity.

The past few years, the school board --- at the recommendation of the school district --- has voted to end multi-track year-round calendars at several schools that didn't enroll enough students to justify the costs.

The district expects to save just more than $1 million with the eight changes, even with all of them still being a form of year-round. That comes from eliminating the additional months of employment for workers.

The second draft of the changes, and what the board approved for the 2027-28 school year, are:

• Heritage Elementary, converting to single-track year-round, after initial proposal for traditional calendar

• Heritage Middle, converting to single-track year-round, after initial proposal for traditional calendar
• Holly Grove Elementary, converting to single-track year-round, after initial proposal for traditional calendar

• Holly Grove Middle, converting to single-track year-round, after initial proposal for traditional calendar

• Holly Springs Elementary, converting to single-track year-round

• Red Road Elementary, converting to single-track year-round

• Pleasant Grove Elementary, converting to single-track year-round

For the 2028-29 school year, the changes are:

• Sycamore Creek Elementary, converting to single-track year-round

The school board voted to change the schools' calendars Tuesday night, after appearing ready to delay the vote to June 2. The board had an extensive conversation with district officials about their first draft proposal on May 5, noting that many families had said they wanted to at least stay year-round, but on just one track of students, something the district isn't recommending for every school.

Some families indicated they preferred the traditional calendar change, as originally proposed, according to district officials and board members. But, overwhelmingly, families, staff and other community members favored keeping year-round schedules.

“Staff and students are less likely to be burned out on year-round calendars,” parent Anna Cole told the board before its vote Tuesday.

She and other parents noted academic benefits, too. Multiple parents said their children with disabilities would do better going to a year-round school, where they won’t have an entire summer off from receiving services, instead of traditional calendar schools.

Board Member Jennifer Job criticized the district's May 13 meeting with families on the proposed changes, because families weren't given the opportunity to give feedback. Families showed up believing they would be able to give feedback, because on the meeting invitation, Job said.

"They felt very silenced," she said.

But Job said she understood district officials' initial recommendation, thinking about the logistics and data they were working with. She said schools aren't a business, and they aren't built to optimize everything.

"I want to thank the staff for the incredible hard work they do trying to tell the future without a crystal ball," Job said, before voting for the single-track year-round changes.

The district is proposing some rules that would allow students to stay on a year-round calendar if their school is proposed to change to a traditional calendar.

If the school is the student's base school, they would get priority if they applied to transfer to a year-round school.

If the students were only attending the year-round school under a calendar transfer application, they would be reassigned to their base school.

They can apply for a stability transfer under the same rules as the other students, apply to another year-round school, or stay at their base school.

The initial draft had not made a recommendation for Heritage Elementary but had noted it could change to traditional or single-track year-round, or it could stay multi-track year-round but would need to pull in students from other attendance zones.

Several parents on Tuesday recommended expanding attendance zones to fill up the Heritage schools.

One challenge in the northeastern corridor of the county is that population growth hasn't translated into proportional enrollment growth in the district's schools in that area. The area has private schools and a higher concentration of charter schools than other parts of the county, and many families in the area are choosing those schools instead.

When a school is underenrolled, even when it's only underenrolled because of the multiple tracks, it can have operational and service constraints. It would not be able to offer as many electives, for example. Or, at a multi-track year-round school, the school may not be able to afford to have every specialist in the school during every track.

Six of the eight schools affected by Tuesday's vote have always been multi-track year-round since they opened in the past 30 years.

Holly Springs Elementary converted from traditional to multi-track year-round in 2007.

Pleasant Grove Elementary converted from traditional to multi-track year-round just two years ago, in anticipation of enrollment that never materialized.

Families and workers at the Holly Grove schools opposed changing to traditional calendars.

The President of Holly Grove Elementary's Parent Teacher Association, Jackie Stearns, said many families, such as hers, enjoyed the year-round structure and at least wanted to keep that schedule, if only on a single-track calendar.

The athletic director at Holly Grove Middle, Shane Zimmerman, preferred traditional if the calendar had to change, arguing that single-track year-round would be tougher for athletics staffing and game attendance.