S254 - Charter School Changes. (SL 2025-80)

Overview: S.L. 2025‑80 (Senate Bill 254) does the following:

• Requires that rules or polices adopted by the State Board of Education (SBE) regarding charter schools must first be approved by the Charter Schools Review Board (CSRB). The CSRB is authorized to propose, recommend, and approve rules and policies on all aspects of charter school operation.
• Directs the SBE to assign the CSRB to conduct any hearings required under federal law on federal funds for charter schools. The CSRB has the duty to make findings and recommendations about these hearings.
• Authorizes the CSRB to employ legal counsel, including private counsel, to advise, represent, and provide litigation services to the CSRB without having to get permission from the Attorney General or the Governor.
• Provides that the Executive Director of the Office of Charter Schools reports and serves at the pleasure of the CSRB, rather than the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Superintendent), at a salary established by the CSRB within the funds appropriated for that purpose.
• Allows for charter schools to relocate without prior approval by the CSRB as long as the new location is within a 10‑mile radius of the location specified and approved in the charter and located within the same local school administrative unit (LEA).
• Requires that all terms of the written charter that a charter school will operate under be approved by the CSRB.
• Provides that charter schools are not required to list class rank on a student's official transcript or record.
• Allows charter schools to develop and use any evaluation for conducting the evaluation of teachers, if the evaluation instrument includes standards and criteria similar to those used in the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards and North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process or such other evaluation standard and process required to be used by LEAs.
• Directs the CSRB to require charter schools that are identified as low‑performing or continually low‑performing to prepare and report plans to improve the performance of the school. Charter schools are not required to create school improvement plans as required for LEAs.
• Requires the SBE to withhold or reduce distribution of funds to a charter school if the CSRB notifies the SBE that a charter school has failed to meet generally accepted standards of fiscal management or has violated a State or federal requirement for receipt of funds. This notification was previously the responsibility of the Superintendent.
• Requires the CSRB, instead of the Superintendent, to create standardized (i) enrollment verification and transfer request documents and (ii) transfer procedures for the per pupil share of the local current expense fund in consultation with charter schools and LEAs.
• Requires the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to provide each charter school with access to any required financial data reporting platforms for the school's first year of operation at no cost.
• Allows charter schools operating under a charter that allows for a remote academy that enrolls or intends to enroll 250 or more students in the remote academy to request that the CSRB grant the remote academy a separate charter. The CSRB must review these requests through an expedited process and cannot require a planning year for the remote academy.
• Requires that a charter school with both in‑person instruction and a remote academy receive a separate school performance grade for the remote academy. The remote academy must be treated as a separate school for the purpose of assessing performance.
• For the 2025‑2027 biennium, requires DPI to use $82,100 per fiscal year of lapsed salary funds to provide operating funds to the CSRB. Legal counsel retained by the CSRB and funded with these monies can provide litigation services to the CSRB.

This bill was vetoed by the Governor on July 2, 2025, and that veto was overridden by the General Assembly on July 29, 2025. This act became effective July 29, 2025, and applies beginning with the 2025‑2026 school year.