Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools are closed on Wednesday – a day being nationally recognized as the “Day Without Women.”

This event was created to highlight the vital role of women in workforce and, although the school system has made clear that is does not support the political nature of the protest, it has said that it supports its female employees.

Jeff Nash – the executive director of community relations for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools – said he first began to hear from female employees several weeks ago.

“We began hearing from some employees that they had intended to participate in the demonstration Wednesday, March 8th, and that would require them to be away from work.”

But he said, at the time, he didn’t know the scope of the event.

“As the day started approaching, we were hearing…from more employees, that they wanted to participate. So, to be careful, we went ahead and asked our principals and our department heads to go ahead and poll their respective staff members and kind of find out what numbers we’re looking at, how big is this?”

As it turns out, pretty big. The informal poll showed that about 400 employees – nearly 20 percent of the school system’s workforce – were planning to take off work that day in order to take part in the “Day Without Women” movement.

“A normal day for us is about five percent absences. So about 100 employees, on a typical day. So we’re figuring three-to-four times the number of normal absences.”

Nash said that is why the system came to the difficult decision to make March 8 an optional teacher workday.
“We want folks to know that this isn’t something our school system is doing as a political statement. This is a safety decision, based entirely upon ‘Can we operate safely for our students?’ And we determined that we could not.”

But he emphasized that, although the system does not endorse the national movement, it does respect its female employees who are choosing to participate in it.

“We do support our female employees, and we value and cherish their work.”

Interim superintendent Dr. Jim Causby made similar statements at last week’s Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education meeting. The meeting happened just hours after the system announced that it would be making Wednesday, March 8, a teacher workday.

“I wanted to get the word out as far in advance as I could so parents, who I know will be inconvenienced, can go ahead and make attempts for other arrangements for the children and for daycare and those kind of things.”

Causby said that the response to the announcement was overwhelmingly positive, but that there were also a few negative reactions.

“While I’m not happy to have made that decision, I’m comfortable with the decision that we’ve made… while we fully support our folks’ right to be involved, we didn’t make the decision because of that. We made the decision because of safety factors.”

Causby said that women make up a particularly large portion of the school system’s bus drivers, cafeteria workers and teachers.

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