About School Days.

The School Days project, a 90-minute documentary film directed and produced by first-time filmmaker Tom Adams, will examine an innovative attempt by the State of North Carolina to change the game in American education.

Twenty-first century humans are blessed with amazing opportunities but cursed with existential threats. Our best insurance against those challenges are active, thoughtful, and well-informed citizens. Creating those citizens is largely the job of educators. How they meet the needs of the children they teach could make the difference for us all between a bright and a bleak future - socially, economically, and politically.

In 2017, the State of North Carolina tasked its universities with creating prototype schools, new models of the traditional laboratory school, that would pioneer approaches to closing the achievement gap between high-income and low-income students. These lab schools would address not only student needs within the classroom, but outside of it, and provide teachers and administrators with the necessary resources to make a difference in how they shape young minds, many from underperforming and resource-challenged areas of the state. Good intentions and bright ideas are in no short supply, but even so, the answer to whether a difference could truly be made with this approach remains uncertain.

And time is running out.

Featuring interviews with state lawmakers, educational influencers, teachers, and students, School Days will take viewers inside the classroom to witness what is working, and what is not. It will chronicles the home lives of students and teachers, examining the impacts of this experiment in schooling and support services. And it will follow students across a 4-year timeframe, as they progress from kindergarten to the fourth grade, documenting their progress and their journey to a new potential.

School Days is a continuation of related documentary work Adams completed for the Anytown, USA series at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. It is a frontline look at an experiment in progress, the ups and downs of trying something new in education, and the young lives at stake if it fails.

Featuring interviews with