EduGram

EduGram Thoughts of the Week:

Normally, I try to lace these weekly diatribes with enough humor or satire to make my point without leaving anyone mad at me... or each other. But this week, I’m steering in a different direction. It was C.S. Lewis who famously noted that you never know what you can do until you try (and that very few try unless they absolutely have to). Now, I don’t have to shake things up... but I figured it’s time to give it the old college try and see if we can actually change a few hearts and minds over on Jones Street with this week's effort.

Over the next few weeks, members of the North Carolina General Assembly will be tying up the loose ends on a state budget and sending it over to the Governor. Right on cue, countless advocacy groups and interested parties are flooding the halls, reaching out to their favorite legislators in hopes of landing funding for their pet projects.

Now, before anyone starts yelling at me, let’s clear two things up: 1) I don’t have a favorite legislator because I love them all equally, and 2) Yes, my valued reader, I’m entirely sure your project is worthy of every single dollar you're asking for. But that’s not what we're tracking in this week's EduGram Thoughts. No, this week we are simply trying to get two specific items tucked into this year's spending plan. They happen to carry higher polling numbers than just about any other issue the NCGA will face this term. And the best part? They won't cost the state a single penny.

First up is the "Opt-In" rule for dental, hearing, and vision screenings. You might recall that when the General Assembly passed the Parents’ Bill of Rights, they shifted almost all school health screenings to an "Opt-In" model rather than "Opt-Out." The idea was simple: a school can’t test a student unless a parent explicitly signs off first.

At the time, the lawmaker’s stated intent was to address certain modern, controversial screenings, not the basic sensory checks that have quietly existed in schools for over a century. Just about everyone agrees that sweeping vision and hearing into this bucket was an accident. But alas, they were included, and here we sit years later with the glitch still unresolved. The real-world impact of this unintended consequence has been dire. Take Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), for example. Screening numbers have absolutely plummeted. When parents are asked why, the answer isn't that they object... it's that they never saw the forms. The paperwork either got buried at the bottom of a backpack or swallowed by a spam folder.

To put some hard numbers on it: in CMS alone, vision screenings crashed by 65%, dropping from 37,816 in the 2022-23 school year to a meager 13,214 the following year. That is a heartbreaking drop for a program where 71% of students flagged with an issue are successfully connected to a healthcare provider. If you extrapolate those numbers statewide across vision, hearing, and dental, it becomes painfully obvious: we shouldn't let universally accepted, life-changing checks suffer just to limit other types of screenings.

The second item is the long-debated school calendar law.

On this one, I’ll concede there is a very small, but very vocal, group that is adamantly opposed to changing it. Now, why would anyone fight to keep a calendar law that is so clearly detrimental to students across the Old North State? Well, apparently, ensuring tourism companies can employ high schoolers for two extra weeks in August is more important than giving those same students the chance to finish their first-semester exams before winter break. It's a built-in academic disadvantage we foist on our kids just so beach umbrellas can be properly stowed after a long day of catering to tourists.

Beyond the basic logic of wrapping up the semester before a multi-week vacation, the most infuriating part of the NCGA's reluctance to fix this is the uneven playing field. Charter schools aren't subject to the rule; their students get tested on material in mid-December while it’s still fresh. Meanwhile, kids in traditional public schools must drag that same material through the holidays and take their tests at the end of January. If anyone wants to argue that it’s a fair system, I’ve got some oceanfront property near the upcoming Buc-ee's in Mebane to sell you.

Perhaps most frustrating of all is that the NCGA tacitly agrees the law is broken. According to a recent report to the State Board of Education, 33 of North Carolina’s 115 school districts are already starting earlier than the statute technically allows. That’s right: roughly 30% of our traditional districts, alongside all charter and private schools, are simply doing what is best for their kids. And guess what? Every single one of them has concluded that the superior calendar ends the semester before winter break. We have a law on the books that nearly everyone agrees that fails our students, yet it remains stubbornly unchanged.

The NCGA has a golden opportunity right now to do something that will directly help kids without costing taxpayers a single dime. They have a real chance to correct two glaring, unintended consequences that almost everyone agrees need to be fixed.

So, much like crowds waiting for Punxsutawney Phil to emerge from his burrow to predict the weather, students and families across North Carolina are watching Raleigh to see if they'll be forced to endure more of the same broken policies. Let's hope that this time, once and for all, the General Assembly corrects these missteps. Our state’s children deserve every advantage we can give them... it's time to stop saddling them with disadvantages their peers will never have to face.