One year after the Durham Public Schools budget debacle that led to pay cuts for thousands of classified employees, DPS administration has once again mismanaged the budget and once again school staff and students will pay the price. In a year that has already seen a transportation crisis, recent revelations show that the district has mismanaged the budget, this time by almost $35 million, and the administration is proposing balancing the budget through cuts to key staff and school resources. Predictably, these cuts to our school budgets have involved no input from staff, students, or the community.
Unfortunately, mistakes of this magnitude come as no surprise to DPS workers. This is what happens when a few people downtown have all the power to make decisions (and mistakes) with no transparency or accountability. While they replaced some executives, the Board of Education has spent the last year reluctant to do anything to actually fix this broken status quo. They have dragged their feet despite thousands of workers and community members emphatically calling for a meet-and-confer process that would finally allow workers the chance to collaborate with management, hold them accountable, improve the way our district is run, and stop these crises from happening in the future.
As a social worker, I know firsthand about DPS’s broken promises. Last spring, our union campaigned for the largest local funding increase in Durham history—$27.4 million in desperately needed new funds. With a small amount of that money, the DPS Board of Education promised to reinstate master’s pay to all those impacted by the state’s 2013 decision to end it. However, when we returned to work this fall, we found out master’s pay would only be restored for classroom teachers, excluding social workers and other instructional support staff.
The explanation for breaking the board’s commitment to social workers and instructional staff was to save the district an estimated $200,000. In November, when the board of education was prepared to right this wrong and vote to reinstate master’s pay for those excluded, Superintendent Dr. Anthony Lewis interrupted the vote, pleading for just four more days to finalize accurate numbers and present a plan. Two months later, we’re still waiting. Meanwhile, decision-makers downtown decided to create a new assistant superintendent position with a starting salary of $155,000.
My social worker colleagues and I serve the most vulnerable students and families in our community—a community that will face increasing systemic inequity under the new Trump administration. On any given day at school, we know our students will bring us devastating challenges ranging from suicidal ideation or fears of deportation to sexual assault or their families getting evicted. In DPS, social workers have caseloads significantly higher than Wake and Chapel Hill school systems, often four times higher than the nationally recommended standards, and yet we continue to show up—because we love our students like they are our own children.
Now, many social workers, who often work multiple jobs to support their own families, are left considering if a future in DPS is possible. When skilled social workers or bus drivers or cafeteria workers or teachers leave the district we love because we have been routinely misled and devalued, the effects are devastating. These broken promises aren’t just a betrayal of workers—they are a betrayal of our most vulnerable students and their families who will bear the brunt of these decisions. Years of DPS mismanagement has created an equity crisis.
If you believe in public education and want the best for Durham’s children, this can all feel demoralizing. Fortunately, there is a solution to all this. Ever since the last budget debacle, our union (which represents a majority of all DPS workers) has been calling on the board to adopt a meet-and-confer policy that would create a set of public meetings where a team of democratically elected worker representatives from the union could meet with a team of decision-makers from management to collaborate on things like district policies and the budget.
This is the norm in school districts and workplaces all over the country and it leads to real improvements—and it is legal in North Carolina despite our ban on public sector collective bargaining. It would empower employees to speak with one united voice and create a new level of transparency and accountability for district decision-makers. The staff who work with students every single day, who understand their needs and understand the stakes, would finally have a powerful voice at the table to force conversations about, for example, whether we should prioritize new positions downtown or essential, frontline staff.
For the last year, instead of embracing the resounding call for a meet-and-confer policy, the board has deferred to Dr. Lewis and the administrators downtown. Unsurprisingly, management has put forward a watered-down, anti-union version of “meet-and-confer” that would ensure no new accountability for themselves and keep workers divided and powerless.
Instead of creating serious, public collaboration between management and our democratic organization representing thousands of workers, their version would create simple roundtable listening sessions for the superintendent where he would hand-pick individual workers he wants to hear from and any organization that wants to come would be invited. Similar meetings have been happening in DPS for years, including this year, and have never led to real change. Management would keep all the power, make no commitments, and still have no accountability. For social workers, classified staff, teachers, and other essential workers facing questions about our pay, this simply is not good enough.
The board of education and Superintendent Dr. Lewis often speak of their commitment to equity and fiscal responsibility. Yet, their actions repeatedly contradict their words. Whether it’s the unfulfilled promise of master’s pay, the transportation crisis, flagrant mismanagement of district finances, or anti-union tactics to avoid accountability, DPS leadership in the last 12 months has repeatedly failed to prioritize staff and student needs.
This latest budget debacle should make it clear that it’s time to stop the excuses and stop defending the status quo. We need a real meet-and-confer policy in DPS so that workers can use our collective power to help bring a new level of transparency, accountability, and equity.
Sonya Lopez is a Durham Public Schools social worker, a Durham native, and a member leader in the Durham Association of Educators.
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