Clinton City Schools students will return to classrooms in early August, get a five-day spring break around Easter 2027 and have approximately two weeks at the Christmas holiday, all thanks to the Board of Education adopting the 2026-27 academic calendar last month.
Members voted unanimously to adopt what was called Option One on Dec. 8 during its regular session, although some discussion of calendar differences was held before the final time line was presented and approved.
Calendar options were first discussed by a committee appointed by the school board (the Teacher Advisory Group) and made up of educators, and then the selected option was presented for final approval by the board.
There were initially two options proposed. One of the key differences between the two options centered around student days off for spring break. Option One purposed that the students begin spring break on Good Friday, March 26, and return to class Monday, April 5, while Option Two saw the beginning of the spring break start Monday, March 22, with students returning on Thursday, March 30.
Another difference was an optional teachers’ workday designated for Friday, July 31, also a part of Option One, but not Option Two.
Option One was chosen by the advisory committee and then presented to the school board.
Under that approved option, the first day of school for the 2026-27 year will be Monday, Aug. 10 , while the last day of school for students is on Friday, May 21. The last day of school is also an early release day for K-12 students. There will be an open house on Thursday, Aug.6, two days before the start of the school year.
City schools superintendent Dr. Wesley Johnson gave insight on how the formatting of the 2026-27 calendar was devised.
“This is a very similar calendar that we’ve had the last two to three years, but what we do is, when it’s time to move forward with a new calendar, we always take that to our Teacher of the Year committee. That group is called the Teacher Advisory Group (TAG), and what I did was present the last year’s calendar and just ask for any updates, suggestions, ideas that they can come up with and just kind of listen to them to see what they suggested, because each year, some things kind of come up. ” Johnson explained.
Johnson mentioned that the city schools has an equal amount of 44 school days per quarter, which equals 176 total school days. To reach that mark, both semesters take up 88 days, with quarter one and two taking place in semester one, and semester two covering the remaining 88 days for quarters three and four.
“There are 44 days, and our semesters are 88 days, whereas some calendars will have a way different days in the first semester and second semester, that’s just one thing that we’re not willing to do. Our semester must be equal and we like for our terms to be equal as well. There were some suggestions that the TAG group came up with; they thought that we had too many days at the end of the school year, so they suggested that we move at least one day to the beginning of the school year, which is what we did, so we actually will start the calendar on July 31, which is a Friday, as an optional workday.”
Johnson noted that teachers preferred to have an optional workday on the last day of July.
“Last year, we did not have a day in July. Our teachers had the entire months of June and July off, and I really thought that they liked that. But, again, this was the suggestion that they have a day in July. (Now) there’s an optional day, if they have some annual days, they don’t have to report to work that day, but they really like to get in their classrooms and get started with putting up their bulletin board, putting the names of the students on the desk, and getting things set up for the school year, because that first week back there’s a lot of activities and a lot of things to do for teachers. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to get things ready for our open house, which is always on the Thursday before the school year starts back,” he explained in an interview.
Early release
A new change to the school-year calendar is early release days for K-8 schools. The dates for early release are Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2026, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2027 and Wednesday, April 14 2027.
“How that kind of came up was our high schools are at the end of the semester and have five testing days that are locked into the calendar because that’s how long it takes to do testing. Because of those five testing days, there were eight extra early release days for our high school, and so we also have a lot of professional development, we have a lot of PLC’s (professional learning communities) that we’re asking all our schools to do. So right in the middle of each quarter or term, our K-8 schools will have an early release so that they can work in their classrooms.
Johnson said there are so many requirements on teachers to complete professional development, that it puts a lot of burden on the teachers to work after school hours. “So we felt that this was important to give them back some time on those early release days,” Johnson explained.
All schools in North Carolina are required to submit at least 185 instructional days or 1,025 instructional hours for an entire academic year. Clinton City has a total of 1,074 hours planned, which would have an additional 49 hours available along 4.9 banked days to use in case of an emergency.
“The actual state law requires that you have 185 school days, or 1,025 (instructional) hours. So since we do 176 school days, we meet the requirement for required hours, and we actually exceed the required hours. We actually have 4.9 banked days, which is almost a full week that would allow us if there is inclement weather, if there is a hurricane, if we’ve got to close school due to a massive power outage or whatever, you’ve got some banked days there that you would not be forced to make up anything in greater number than that 4.9 (days). We would have to make up on optional work days, so we would potentially utilize some of those work days if the bank days ever got close to being exhausted. Let’s say for instance, you had a hurricane that knocked you out for a couple days in September or October, you wouldn’t want to use all your bank days just in case there were additional (days of) inclement weather. We would play it by ear just to see, but we do have those bank days and we would take from the bank days before we would use the optional work days.” Johnson said.
According to Johnson, approximately 80 percent of the teachers voted in favor of Option One of the calendar.