At last night’s Wake County school board meeting, district superintendent Robert P. Taylor presented his $2.29 billion draft operating budget for the 2026-2027 school year. The proposal does not include any funding for new programs and recommends about $15 million in “strategic budget realignments,” or, put plainly, budget cuts.
Although the proposal represents a $44 million increase over the current year’s operating budget, it isn’t enough to offset increasing staffing and operations costs, hence the cuts.
“Each year, it becomes more expensive to maintain current service levels,” Taylor’s budget proposal reads. “Rising costs for staffing, benefits, transportation, utilities, and essential operations continue to increase pressure on the district’s operating budget. This budget includes targeted reductions and operational adjustments designed to manage costs responsibly while preserving the core educational services that support teaching and learning in our schools. We recognize that every reduction affects our families, students, and the dedicated staff who serve them each day.”
The consensus among district leaders seems to be that budgeting is getting harder every year due to inflation, aging infrastructure, unfunded mandates, required payments to charter schools, and state- and federal-level uncertainty.
Taylor’s proposed cuts include $2.2 million in funding for elementary literacy coaches and $2.5 million for transportation. His budget document also lists $10 million in cuts to special education, but he told the board to disregard that line item. Last month, his suggestion to cut 130 special education teacher positions generated such an outcry from teachers, parents, and school board members that he agreed to leave the special education budget alone and make reductions elsewhere. But he didn’t have time to revise his budget proposal ahead of Tuesday’s meeting and hasn’t yet identified what he will cut instead.
“I, and my administration, have heard from the board and heard from our community, and we want to reaffirm … we are not firing 130 teachers,” Taylor said.
WCPSS chief business officer David Neter said district staff will present alternative cuts to the school board at its first budget work session on April 21. School board members have indicated they would be most willing to reduce non-academic roles like central office staff or assistant principals.
Faithful school board-watchers may feel a sense of déja vu from last year’s budget process, when Taylor described a need to make “tough choices due to limited resources” and proposed about $19 million worth of cuts.
The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is the largest school district in North Carolina, serving about 160,000 students across 203 schools. Unlike other local governing bodies, school boards don’t have any taxing authority, and instead have to ask the state, county, and federal government for money. Next year, if Taylor’s budget requests are met, about 7% of WCPSS’s budget will come from the federal government, 55% will come from the state, and the remaining 38% will come from local sources, primarily Wake County.
Even in the best of times, North Carolina is an inadequate, unreliable funder of WCPSS. Despite serving about 12% of all public school students in the state, WCPSS receives some of the lowest per-pupil funding from the state of any district, ranking 110th out of 115 in the 2024-2025 school year. This year, the state has not passed a comprehensive budget, so it’s harder than usual to predict what amount of funding the district might receive.
Wake County has historically stepped in to pick up the state’s slack and adequately fund WCPSS. As the district grows and costs rise, the state funding gap keeps getting bigger, and the county ends up paying more. For the last four years, Wake has increased its appropriation to WCPSS by an average of $50 million each year, according to a March presentation to the school board. Taylor is proposing a notably smaller increase of about $25 million for the upcoming year—even though district leaders say their real need is “far in excess” of that amount.
Taylor’s budget proposal reflects the amount he expects Wake County is willing and able to give the district based on the county’s slower projected revenue growth this coming year. Some other North Carolina school districts do it differently, asking for fully funded, no-cuts budgets and leaving it to their counties to decide how much to fund. The Durham Public Schools board of education, for instance, recently requested an additional $28.5 million in funding from Durham County with the understanding that the county doesn’t currently have that much money to spare and would need to raise taxes by several cents to accommodate the request.
As Neter presented Taylor’s budget proposal inside a moderately full boardroom Tuesday evening, boisterous chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, austerity budget has got to go” filtered in from outside the building. A throng of union members from the Wake chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) had assembled to demand a fully-funded budget.
“They [the school board] are backwards,” WCPSS teacher and Wake NCAE member Jessica Boone told the INDY mid-protest. “They just ask for what they think they can get instead of what we need. There should be no cuts, and in fact, we need to ask to fully fund our schools.”
The school board has about five weeks to tweak Taylor’s proposal as they see fit before sending it to the Wake County board of commissioners for approval by May 15. During that window, the school board will gather feedback via two community meetings, a public hearing, and a survey of families in the district.
Separate from Taylor’s budget proposal, the school board on Tuesday night unanimously passed a resolution asking the Wake County board of commissioners to put a $680 million school construction bond referendum on the ballot this November. If it passes, the referendum will help fund the district’s seven-year capital improvement plan to build seven new schools and renovate 17 more.
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