Teachers and students will have five extra school days next year, and this year's 15 coveted teacher work days will be cut down to nine.

Johnston County Schools received a waiver to keep the 180-day school year despite a mandate in June's budget bill that added five more days.

That waiver expires for the 2012-2013 year, forcing the school board to approve a 185-school-day calendar at their meeting last week.

But the N.C. General Assembly is planning to revisit the legislation in the short session in February after school officials and parents began complaining that five extra days would be logistically and financially difficult.

A 2004 school calendar law championed by the state tourism industry bookended the school year to begin no later than Aug. 25 and end no later than June 10, making it more difficult to squeeze in five extra days without cutting holidays and teacher work days.

"I don't know of any administrator or educator that's opposed to having five additional days. It's only going to improve academic achievement," said Johnston County Superintendent Ed Croom. "But trying to cram it in without any wiggle room at the front end or the back end doesn't work."

Croom said the N.C. Association of School Administrators has been speaking with legislators about their concerns regarding the start and end date.

"That's a conflict with the tourism industry," Croom said. "I don't think they understand the amount of work that goes in at the end of the semester to get grades done. Teachers don't have time to get paperwork done."

Hoping for a reprieve

The Johnston County schools calendar committee will meet again in January to devise a 180-day calendar in case the legislature moves to change the law in the short session.

N.C. Rep. James Langdon, R-Johnston, said that while the legislature might take any action in the short session, it will definitely consider the concerns that school officials have brought to its attention.

"We'll definitely look at it and address the concerns they seem to have," Langdon said. "One of the things is, doing the five days in the calendar, as it is now, I think it was pressing some of the things that they wanted to do."

Langdon said the legislature can only take action on money-related issues in the short session. But as five extra days will cost Johnston County schools $250,000 in transportation, pay and nutrition, the issue could be considered actionable.

Langdon said it's unlikely that the legislature would reexamine the bookend law in the short session. The legislature introduced a bill last year to restore local flexibility to school calendars, but it never made it out of committee.

Randy Parker, a science teacher at Clayton High School, sat on the calendar committee this year and found it challenging to fit in the necessary holidays, annual leave days and teacher work days within the summer vacation mandate.

"The big constraint is the legislature mandating you can't start past June 10 or before Aug. 25. There weren't a lot of options as to what you can do without those dates being released or being flexible with those dates. It puts us in a bind," Parker said.

The current schedule makes it especially difficult for high school students, because exams have been pushed ahead to after winter break.

"Those kids have Christmas break, come back for a week or two weeks, then we're back in exams again. A few years back when we left at Christmas we were done with the semester," Parker said.

"It doesn't affect middle or elementary, but there's about a week or so that we lose with those kids because we've got testing and remediation and retesting right after Christmas," Parker said, referring specifically to students who lose time in year-long advanced placement classes like AP Biology.

Losing work days

As for teacher workdays, the calendar committee managed to keep the days that Parker said are most important - the ones at the beginning, middle and end of the school year.

For high school, having a workday between semesters is crucial for preparing for the next batch of students, Parker said. In middle schools and elementary schools, workdays at the end of each quarter are important for grading, and those days have been taken away in October and March.

In fact, one of the problems that Johnston County Schools Chief Personnel Officer Robin Little pointed out at the school board meeting is that there is no break between a work day in January and Spring break at the very end of March.

The committee managed to save Labor Day, maintain six teacher work days at the start of the year and two at the end, and they managed to keep the Wednesday before Thanksgiving as a holiday.

Parker said that while many teachers might miss the extra workdays - 10 years ago there were 20 - he said he usually has his grades in before the end of the quarter.

"As far as (finishing) grades and materials and that kind of thing, with the way the exam schedule is, if we're not proctoring or giving an exam we have some time in our classroom to be able to get some of our work done," Parker said.

The real loss, he said, could be felt in losing teacher work days as training days for the implementation of the new federal Common Core and state Essential Standards curriculum.

"Where that's going to go in the school year, I don't know, but I would hope that those get done on work days rather than school days, because I'd hate to be pulled out of the classroom to do that training."

information provided by The Clayton News-Star