Press Releases

More than 900,000 North Carolina students rely on the nutritious meals and snacks served during the school year through the breakfast, lunch, and afterschool meals programs provided at their schools. When school is out of session, North Carolina’s Summer Nutrition Programs help fill the gap by providing free meals and snacks to children ages 18 and younger who might otherwise go hungry.

About 440 fewer teachers left North Carolina’s public schools during the 2021-22 school year than the previous year, improving the state’s overall teacher attrition rate, which had edged up slightly during 2020-21, when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak.

North Carolina teachers with higher effectiveness ratings prior to the disruptions of the 2020-21 COVID-19 school year helped mitigate learning loss as students and teachers managed remote instruction, hybrid learning and other responses to the pandemic, a new analysis of student outcomes shows.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction’s Center for Safer Schools (CFSS) on Tuesday, Jan. 24 officially opened its temporary training facility at Samarcand.

Today, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) announced the second cohort of educators who will help create a more resilient, tech-savvy future for North Carolina schools.

In an effort to continue to modernize Career and Technical Education programs and classrooms across North Carolina, the General Assembly allotted $3 million in 2022 for State Superintendent Catherine Truitt to award funds to school districts via two grant programs.

Nine teachers from across North Carolina have been selected as the state’s regional Teachers of the Year for their dedication, innovation and ability to inspire students to achieve.

Entering her third year as North Carolina’s leader of K-12 education, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt is sharpening her signature strategic plan, Operation Polaris, with new focus areas while continuing to press for progress along a number of key fronts, from pandemic recovery to strengthening student literacy.

Students in early elementary grades in North Carolina public schools continue to show gains in literacy skills, according to results of a key assessment administered at the beginning of the current school year.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) was recently awarded roughly $17 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education to help meet the mental health needs of students in the state’s public schools. The funding will enable NCDPI to leverage partnerships with institutions of higher education and 15 school districts to increase the number and diversity of mental health service providers in high-needs schools. Starting this month and continuing through 2027, these grants will help the state bolster the pipeline of school-based mental health service providers, including school counselors, school social workers and school mental health clinicians

When Jessica Barnette gathered her kindergarten and first-grade students this morning to walk to Rocky Point Elementary’s multi-purpose room, she thought they were attending a preview of the school’s winter concert. She must have been a bit puzzled by the presence of the district superintendent and several unfamiliar adults. After all, the big event was the following evening.

A dozen North Carolina school districts and one charter school will benefit this year from a total of $800,000 in grants aimed at developing student skills in computer science through coding. The Coding and Mobile App Development Grant program, launched in 2017 with funding from the General Assembly, supports partnerships with local businesses to help schools develop computer science, coding and mobile app development programs for middle and high school students.

Progress continues for the advisory group of school leaders who convened again today for the third time to discuss revising the state’s unpopular A-F school performance grading model. During today’s meeting, members split into groups to consider alternative indicators, academic and non-academic, that could be included in a final model to better measure school quality.  

Two hundred school districts and charter schools across North Carolina will benefit from more than $74.1 million in school safety grants announced today by the Department of Public Instruction’s Center for Safer Schools. 

North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS), operating under the governance of the N.C. State Board of Education, has been honored for high quality online learning from an international organization that focuses on quality assurance of digital teaching and learning offered by higher education and K-12 schools.

North Carolina’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress given during the 2021-22 school year to fourth and eighth graders generally mirrored a national decline in reading and math skills as schools everywhere were beginning to recover ground lost to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A recent statewide survey about how North Carolina public school performance is graded drew more than 26,000 participants, most of whom said that the current A-F grading system needs to be revised to give more weight to student growth and to include more non-academic criteria.

An initiative led by the N.C Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to define the skills and mindsets students need for success after high school has been unfolding since March. Now, with the help of 1,200 North Carolinians across the state, this grassroots-informed Portrait of a Graduate has been finalized.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) and North Carolina Collaboratory are leading a joint $6.73 million effort to spur research on the impact of COVID-19 on student learning in the state, with the goal of helping educators and students recover from pandemic-related disruptions and lost instructional time.