About
The North Carolina school directory we wanted to exist
When school starts, when the breaks fall, which school an address is zoned to, how a school did on its report card — those facts sit across340 district and charter websites, a state report-card portal and a great many PDFs. This site puts them on one page per district and one per school, with the source named on every page.
The printable calendar, and who it is for
Every district with published dates gets a one-page sheet: the whole school year on US Letter, every marked day coloured by what it is, and the key dates listed down the side. Each sheet is drawn from that district's own dates, so no two are alike — and where a school publishes its own events, the school gets a sheet of its own too.
What this site does
- Calendars. The 2026–27 key dates for each district and charter — first and last day, holidays, breaks, workdays and board meetings — with the district's own published calendar shown beside them, a printable sheet, and a calendar file you can subscribe to. Schools that post their own events get a calendar of their own, with the district's dates folded in.
- District and school profiles. Enrollment, grade span, county, contact details, student demographics, the NC School Report Card, and the district drawn on a real map with every campus on it.
- Attendance zones. Where a district publishes its zones as map data, each school's catchment is drawn with its neighbours around it. Where it does not, the school is placed on a map with the nearest schools and how far they are.
- Direct answers. When is spring break? Which school serves this address? How did this school score? Each is a fact on a page, not a search box.
Where the data comes from
Nothing here is invented, and every page names its source.
- Districts and schools — NCES Common Core of Data (CCD), U.S. Department of Education, the federal government's annual census of every public school and agency, for the 2024-2025 school year. Compiled August 31, 2026.
- Report cards — the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's published School Report Cards: performance grade, growth, proficiency, attendance and staffing.
- Demographics — NCES enrollment by race, ethnicity, grade and program.
- Boundary and zone maps — district boundaries from the Census school-district geography NCES publishes; attendance zones from each district's or county's own GIS service; all drawn on an OpenStreetMap basemap.
- Calendar dates — each district's or school's own published calendar, read from its calendar feed or its published document. The original document is shown on the calendar page and credited with a link to where it came from. 226 of those documents are mirrored here.
How it is built
Every page is pre-rendered static HTML, so it loads fast on a phone. The printable sheets and calendar files are generated from the same dates shown on the page, so a sheet can never disagree with the site — when a district revises its calendar, the page, the sheet and the feed are rebuilt together. Maps only load when scrolled into view.
How districts are counted
North Carolina has 115 public school districts — one per county, plus city districts. Each charter school is its own local education agency in federal records, so charters appear here as agencies of one school; 222 of them. A few state-run and federal schools are listed by NCES with little more than a name, and are kept for completeness.
What we are careful about
- Dates change. Boards amend calendars mid-year, especially after weather days. Every calendar page links the district's official source and says when the dates were read. Confirm anything time-sensitive there.
- Zones are the district's call. Addresses near a boundary are often decided case by case, and zones are redrawn. A map here shows what the district published and when; the district decides assignment.
- Nothing is guessed. A district whose calendar could not be read has no calendar page rather than an empty one. A document that could not be confirmed as a district's own is marked for review rather than presented as certain.
- We are not the district. Nothing here is an official communication from any school or district, and it is never presented as one.
- Corrections come first. If a date, number or boundary is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed — see below.
Who runs it
Khurram Shahzad
Founder · Curator, Schools Publishing Ltd
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada · Remote
Back To School NC is founded and maintained by Khurram Shahzad, curator at Schools Publishing Ltd. It started from a small annoyance: answering “when does school start” meant opening a different website for every district. It now covers all 115 districts in North Carolina and every one of its 222 charter schools — and is the North Carolina edition of Back to School Texas.
Found something wrong?
Corrections take priority over everything else here. Send the page address and what should change, and include the district page or document it came from if you have it — that is what lets it be fixed the same day.
Independence
Back To School NC is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the U.S. Department of Education, or any school district or charter school. District and school names, logos and calendars belong to those districts and schools, and are shown for identification with the source credited. Always confirm details — especially calendar dates and enrollment — against the official source linked on each page.