Schools in Charlotte, across North Carolina will not return until fall, Cooper announces

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, along with all public schools in the state, will be closed to in-person teaching for the rest of the academic year under a new executive order from Gov. Roy Cooper announced Friday.

Remote learning will continue for the rest of the year, Cooper said.

“Today, we’ve had to make another tough choice,” Cooper said. “School buildings may be closed, but learning is not over.”

State board chair Eric Davis said that officials were working to create an opportunity to jumpstart the next school year for kids in greatest need, focusing on early grades and literacy. Davis said he was hopeful that with additional funding, that opportunity could be expanded to more children.

Officials emphasized that when students do return to physical school buildings, public education will not look the same as it did before, with expanded safety measures in response to the coronavirus.

“Rest assured, we will operate our schools differently,” Davis said. “Because the safety of your child and your child’s teacher demands nothing less.”

Teachers and school employees will keep working and remain eligible to be paid, Davis said, and districts should continue to assign work to hourly employees. In CMS, leave policies approved at the state and local level allowed hourly employees to be paid if they were unable to work remotely through May 15, the previous end date for the school closures before Friday’s executive order.

Cooper also announced a $1.4 billion proposal to allocate money from the federal CARES act, which would give $78 million to school nutrition and $243 million to support the state’s public school system.

Students and teachers have been cleared from school buildings since March 13, the last day of in-person classes before Cooper ordered the closure of schools across the state in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

As of Friday, more than 8,000 people have tested positive for coronavirus. In Mecklenburg County, there have been 1,400 cases of COVID-19 and 37 deaths.

Since then, instruction has moved online for CMS’s nearly 150,000 students. The decision to extend the closures will prolong remote learning, raising numerous questions about equity, access and student performance.

The state board of education addressed some of those questions in a vote on Thursday, approving a proposal to temporarily change grading policies for all public and charter schools in North Carolina in response to the coronavirus pandemic, with no failing grades being issued for the spring semester.

Students in kindergarten through fifth grade will not receive final grades for the academic year. Instead, teachers will provide year-end feedback and document each student’s strengths and needs to ease their transition into the 2020-21 school year starting in the fall.

For children in middle and high schools, grades will be given on a pass or withdraw basis, using the newly created PC19 and WC19 designations created in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Grades can only be improved from where students stood in the course as of March 13, and the inability to complete coursework will not harm a student’s grade.

Sixth through eighth grade students will get a PC19 grade if they were meeting expectations as of March 13, and a WC19 if they were unable to improve to the point of passing the course through remote learning. But earning a WC19 does not equate to failing, and should not be used as an indicator of whether to hold students back or repeat a course.

High school students will have the choice of whether to record a numeric grade, which would factor into their GPA, or record either a pass or withdraw, which would not be included in their GPA.

Promotion to the next grade will be up to individual school principals, but the state Department of Public Instruction recommended only holding back students who were already under serious consideration for retention prior to the closure.

The guidelines approved by the state board provide much-anticipated clarity for parents, students and educators in CMS, which has held off on assigning grades as it awaited direction from the state. District leaders have emphasized that remote learning during the closure is meant to be a value-add for students, and should not negatively impact children who might not be able to participate fully.

For roughly three weeks after Cooper’s first executive order closing schools, CMS held off on teaching new material as it worked to survey students’ access to technology and their ability to log on to the internet. The district has since handed out more than 80,000 devices and hotspots, but earlier this month, deputy superintendent Matt Hayes said there were still a significant number of students the district had not been able to reach to assess their needs.

A state House committee backed a draft bill calling for temporarily waiving the school calendar law to allow traditional-calendar schools to begin as early as Aug. 17. The bill also calls for creating a statewide program in early August to help catch up at-risk students who may have fallen behind academically during the school closures.

This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 2:11 PM.