Schools in Wayne County were already struggling before COVID-19 When Wayne County Public Schools reopened in August for a mix of in-person instruction and remote learning, Fran Smith, an officer in the local branch of the NAACP, began to receive daily calls from teachers worried about their safety.

Amber Williams has seen better days. But the mother of four girls isn’t complaining. Her young family has a roof over its head at the Urban Ministries homeless shelter in Durham. There’s food to eat. Her middle school-age daughter has a reliable internet connection to access online classes at Lucas Middle School, which is holding virtual instruction because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A complaint lodged by John Scanlon and his family was the catalyst for a damning state audit that found courses offered by NCVirtual Public School lacked quality and rigor, and that educators hired to create content for an honor’s history course engaged in plagiarism and copyright infringement. The state Department of Public Instruction is the administrator for the school. State Auditor Beth Wood cited the family’s role in the investigation while presenting the findings to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee on Tuesday.

State lawmakers have to find the money, but Republicans could dig in their heels The judge overseeing North Carolina’s landmark Leandro school funding case signed a consent order Tuesday calling for $427 million in additional education spending to help the state meet its constitutional obligation to provide all children with the opportunity to obtain a sound basic education.

The Charter Schools Performance Framework Report gives insight into the academic, financial and operational performances of the state’s charter schools Each year, the Office of Charter Schools combs though thousands of documents to create a report for the State Board of Education showing whether schools are meeting performance goals.

Respondents in NC skeptical of Trump's leadership, in-person school reopening One in 10 Latino households have someone in the home who has contracted the coronavirus. More than half of the nation’s Latino families face job loss and income due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Eighty-five percent of Latino parents are worried about children contracting coronavirus if and when schools reopen for in-person instruction while 77% are concerned about their children falling behind academically if they don’t return to school.

The state’s two virtual charter schools should be shining examples of remote learning. But instead of basking in the glow of high demand, the schools are facing tough questions about their students’ academic performances.  For the fourth consecutive year, NC Cyber Academy  and NC Virtual Academy both have performance ratings of "D," said David Stegall, deputy state superintendent of innovation at a Charter School Advisory Board meeting this week. “It does concern me that they are not high-performing charter schools,” he said.

Last year, after four consecutive years of poor academic performance, state lawmakers rewarded North Carolina’s virtual charter school pilot program with an extension that allows its two schools to operate through the 2022-23 school year.  The pilot program created in 2015 was supposed to end after the 2018-19 school year. But lawmakers apparently saw something promising in N.C. Cyber Academy (NCCA) and N.C. Virtual Academy (NCVA) not reflected in their academic performances.

Millions of children will begin the new school year learning from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The pivot to remote learning for U.S. schools has exposed a troubling digital divide between children from low-income families, mostly Black and Latinx students, and their peers from wealthier zip codes. > ...

On July 16, the Onslow County Board of Education weighed one of the biggest decisions it had ever faced. Should it bring nearly 27,000 students back to 39 school buildings for in-person instruction in the middle of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that’s killed more than 1,800 people in North Carolina? ...