NEW HANOVER COUNTY — A bid to swap a day off after the Super Bowl for the day off on Yom Kippur failed to gain approval in the eyes of the New Hanover County school board last week.
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The New Hanover County Board of Education took up its 2026-2027 traditional school calendar at its Nov. 5 meeting. Board member Tim Merrick suggested the board honor the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur with a teacher workday, though the board voted 3-3 and it failed.
As suggested by the NHCS calendar committee, the board approved of “Option B” for the traditional schools calendar — which includes 177 instructional days, 44 days in almost every quarter, 10 designated and seven undesignated teacher workdays, and 11 holiday days.
In regard to Yom Kippur, Chief Academic Officer Robin Hamilton said the district granted two religious exceptions to two students requesting excused absences to observe the holiday this school year and received an email requesting the district mark the day as holiday in the 2026-2027 year.
Still, 88% of the 37-member calendar committee voted to stick with only recognizing state-designated holidays, according to Hamilton.
Board member Tim Merrick said he normally discourages straying from councillors’ advice, but he thought it was important to find a way to recognize the holiday based on, what he claimed, multiple calls and emails about recognizing the holiday. Merrick said he was stopped several times in public as well.
“Almost every parent told me: ‘My child told me I can’t miss school I don’t care whether I get it off or not, I don’t want to miss sports, I don’t want to miss a test, it’s hard to catch up afterwards, it’s hard to be seen as different from my student colleagues,’” Merrick said, noting around 200 of the district’s students are Jewish.
Merrick suggested the board swap the teacher workday scheduled for the day after the Super Bowl — Monday, Feb. 15 — for a workday on Monday, Sept. 21. Though he recognized the efficiency of the February date on the committee, Merrick argued the day off could be better served elsewhere.
“Most parents were asking me to advocate for their religious freedoms, but I kind of have a different spin on it — I believe this is a teaching moment for every single one of our kids to be able to realize not everyone is Christian, not everyone follows the same worshipping patterns and that because Christmas and Easter are taken off we assume they’re very important,” he said. “When we take off a day for another religion, it tells our students that that other religion, that other culture, is important.”
Merrick’s move was seconded by board member Pete Wildeboer; board member David Perry indicated support as well.
Board member Josie Barnhart was not in favor and said picking holidays to take off would be a “slippery slope.”
“It’s showing our own prejudice and bias for specific religions we would like to honor and I think that’s dangerous,” Barnhart said.
The board member said she also thought it would be a disservice to teachers if the board took away their only day off from Jan. 19 to March 25. According to Hamilton, the Feb. 15 date was popular among the committee’s stakeholders.
Board member Pat Bradford also expressed displeasure with the switch-up.
“We’re going to be violating what we’re supposed to be doing,” she said.
Her claim was the district wouldn’t be allowed to take off on holidays not sanctioned by the state, though this isn’t true; the district can choose which days it is in session as long as it meets the minimum instructional hours required. The bare minimum would be 171 days in session to reach the 1,026 instructional hours threshold, though the district would prefer more to provide a cushion for emergencies, such as snow days or hurricanes.
Barnhart also pushed for the district to stay in line with the state, which recognizes several holidays during the traditional year, including Christmas, Good Friday, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and New Year’s Day.
“There are different things that me and my family celebrate that are not on this calendar, that we partake in those and I have every right to do it just like every parent has the right to participate what they want,” Barnhart said, though didn’t refer to specific religious observances that isn’t already a holiday in the district.
The split vote came down to Bradford, Barnhart and Chair Melissa Mason against the suggested swap and Merrick, Perry and Wildeboer were in favor. Board member Judy Justice was absent from the meeting; thus, the motion failed because it didn’t gain a majority.
Right before the vote, Perry indicated he wasn’t given an opportunity to speak on Merrick’s suggestion, but his comment was ignored. However, Perry did speak on another aspect of the calendar before Merrick’s suggestion was brought up, asking Hamilton if she thought the presented option was the best version for students, regardless of state law. He pointed out a quarter of the state’s school districts are breaking with state statute.
Superintendent Chris Barnes stepped in.
“This calendar does not match what an ideal student learning calendar should be,” he said, noting the best version would begin earlier, match the community college’s schedule and end high school’s first semester before winter break.
A few years ago, the district went through a laborious calendar approval process because of where the state-mandated start date fell in the calendar.
State law requires the first day of school to be the Monday closest to Aug. 26, as lobbied for by the tourism industry. Where that Monday falls every year could mean the addition or subtraction of a week of school, which becomes a big deal, particularly for high schoolers, who typically want to take end-of-semester exams before the weeks-long Christmas break in December.
This tension played out over multiple meetings in the process of creating the 2023-2024 calendar. The only way the calendar could be configured to host exams before winter break was if the calendar broke the law. The NHCS calendar committee ultimately voted in favor of this option, but the board at the time chose not to approve it due to fear of state repercussions. At the time, the calendar statutes didn’t state any consequences for districts who defied it.
The landscape is different now: Carteret County, Union County and Davidson County school systems dropped their plans to defy the calendar law after being sued, though deviant calendars still exist. The state legislature has taken notice, the Senate passing Senate Bill 754 earlier this year. The bill would have allowed districts to start on the Monday closest to Aug. 19, but it also included penalties for violating the law, including the withholding of their central office administrative allotment and a $10,000 civil judgement against them. The legislation was never taken up by the House of Representatives.
Barnes encouraged the NHCS community to expand its advocacy to the state level and request more flexibility in the calendar law.
In the meantime, the district is going back to approving one year’s calendar at a time; in 2023, it approved both the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 traditional calendars at once. Barnes said the legislature could try to amend calendar law again next year and he wanted the district to be ready to approve a more student-focused calendar.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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