At Thursday’s school board meeting, Durham Public Schools’ chief financial officer Jeremy Teetor told the board that he was eyeing using some of philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s $18 million donation to help fill the current $7 million budget shortfall.
About $4 million from the 2022 donation is estimated to be unspent, with $1.5 million not yet budgeted, per Teetor’s presentation. The rest was set aside for various categories including equity, professional development, and the “growing together” school reassignment plan. One million was labeled for “school leadership,” which Teetor said “seems like a placeholder.”
“We’re really stressing the word ‘potential’ here because we are still having some conversations with folks on staff,” said Teetor, adding that the estimate of available funds may change as staff take stock of potential projects set for February or March. “We want to make sure we honor some things that have good intentions.”
DPS announced the $7 million shortfall in January. There is no one single reason for the gap between the expected and actual expenditures this year, as the district spent more than expected on payroll, charter schools, child nutrition, and more. Even with the realignment of the Scott funds and another $1.5 million from a pre-K fund, the district would still need to come up with about $1.6 million to fix the overage.
Scott’s unsolicited donation to DPS is only a small portion of the $19.2 billion that the billionaire (and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) has given away in a philanthropic blitz since 2019. Much of the money has gone to programs focused on education and equity, including HBCUs and K-12 districts.
A few months after Scott’s donation, the Durham school board approved a spending plan to allocate $8.22 million for academics, $3.5 million for charter schools, $2.5 million for HR, $1.5 million for transportation, $1.28 million for school support, and $1 million for operations.
Community members initially had big dreams for the donation. In 2023, Riverside High School’s student publication The Pirates’ Hook published an op-ed suggesting the money be put towards bus improvements, support for impoverished families, field trips, and classroom improvements.
And on Thursday, board member Natalie Beyer said that $1 million “might have been for affordable teacher housing.”
“It is a dream that this board has had for many, many, many, many years,” said Beyer. “I think it’s critical that we not let those dreams die and those plans die.”
Teeter, who started as CFO in November of 2024, found the overage through an examination of the district’s finances. The last CFO, Paul LeSieur, resigned after last year’s classified pay debacle in which the district tried to roll back promised raises for classified staff after realizing it didn’t have the money.
While they try to clean up this year’s financial mess and ongoing issues providing school bus service, staff and the board seemed well aware that budget season for next year is already underway. The public will have an opportunity to provide ideas at a February 20 hearing, and the superintendent’s staff is set to put together a recommended budget by the end of March.
“I continue to see this as a clean-up year,” board member Emily Chávez told Teetor. “Thank you for being thorough, but I’m most interested in the systems that you’re putting into place to ensure that our budget, going forward, will be accurate, tight, and centering of our students.”
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].