Wake cancels school on Election Day -- for most

There will be no school on Election Day in the Wake County Public School System — for most schools.

The county school board approved the measure Tuesday after months of being asked to do so by parents concerned that schools used a polling places presented safety concerns for students. Now, school leaders plan to keep schools closed on Election Day in future years.

Tuesday’s vote did not include multi-track year-round schools, after district officials discovered those schools would likely not have any banked days for inclement weather if the change were made.

The board will vote Aug. 16 on a plan for those schools to have Nov. 8 off, and board members so far favor a plan that would make Oct. 10 a school day — currently a teacher workday — for those schools. That plan would leave them with one banked day.

A group of parents, called Safe School Polling, has been requesting schools be closed to instruction on Election Day as a means of limiting strangers’ access to students. During the 2018 general election, they note, nearly 77,000 people voted at a system school. The group has started a petition that has more than 600 signatures so far.

“It’s a sad commentary actually, that safety is a concern on a day where we’re expressing democracy, and that our students aren’t witnessing that because of safety concerns,” Board Member Christine Kushner said. “That’s just sad.”

The school calendars, for those that will officially now have Nov. 8 off, won’t change in any other way. Taking Election Day off will only reduce the school system’s flexibility to account for severe weather and possible school closures. Instead of having three days to cancel school for weather with no repercussions, schools will have just two.

On Tuesday, the school system recommended using remote learning days for weather and other emergencies once those two banked days have been used, though board members expressed some skepticism and did not hold a vote.

School security has been top of mind since a gunman massacred 21 people and injured 18 others at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May.

The May 24 attack is the latest among years of indiscriminate mass school shootings that have occurred for decades in the United States, claiming the lives of hundreds of students, educators and others, including several dozen in just the past five years.

Wake County election officials can assign any public building to be a polling place. In Wake County, more than a third of polling sites are Wake County Public School System schools (75 of 208 sites). That’s more than a third of the system’s nearly 200 schools.

Voters at the schools are often corralled in a specific location to vote but do not have to go through the school’s typical visitor check-in process.