Local public school students will be out of classes on Friday while thousands of their teachers go to Raleigh to rally for more funding from the state.
Durham, Chapel Hill-Carrboro, Chatham, and Orange County public schools added teacher workdays on Friday after thousands of employees put in requests for the day of the “Kids Over Corporations” rally (Wake County had already planned a workday before the rally was announced). In Durham, nearly two weeks before the planned rally, school staff had projected about 900 teacher vacancies.
This won’t be the first teacher march on Jones Street in recent years. Reilly Finnegan, a teacher at Hillside High School who was recently elected the vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), recalled a similar day in 2018 when thousands marched on the state legislature in the state’s first mass teacher walkout, but said that this protest shows how unions like the NCAE have started to leverage their political power in response to the growing funding crisis of public schools in North Carolina.
Since then, the Republican-controlled state legislature has budgeted the state’s schools to the bottom of various national lists, coming in 43rd in average teacher salary and dead last in prioritizing public school funding. Just this month, the state supreme court struck down the landmark Leandro case, which was part of a prolonged battle to push the state to appropriately fund public schools.
Finnegan said that is an indication that educators need to show up to rally and to get to the ballot box more.
“If these people don’t want public schools to exist, they can’t be running our public schools,” said Finnegan. “Anyone who champions public schools needs to start acting differently and recognize the urgency of the moment.”
Educator unions and elected school board members can often be at odds, publicly quibbling over what to do with the limited dollars they do receive from the state. Finnegan said that, in this case, many local board members “understand that we’re all on the same team.”
“It’s in their interest for us to fight back and get the funding we deserve to keep public schools alive,” said Finnegan. “This is a necessary campaign and fight to pick if we want public schools to make it another 10 years.”
Wake County school board chair Tyler Swanson feels this acutely. Despite being the largest of the state’s 115 districts, the Wake County Public School System ranks 110th in per pupil funding from the state, which means it relies on local sources like Wake County for more than a third of its budget. The Wake chapter of the NCAE has been pushing the school board to ask for more funding from the county.
“The General Assembly has not done their constitutional duties as it relates to public education,” Swanson told the INDY. “[Republicans] have chosen to underfund and disrespect public education teachers through policy malpractice, because choosing to not do the right thing, choosing to not follow the Constitution, is a policy decision.”
According to a recent National Education Association report, the real value of North Carolina teacher pay, on average, has dropped about 10% over the past decade accounting for inflation. They have not received adjustments from the state since legislators have failed to pass a budget since 2023.
But rather than just demanding raises, the educators’ unions are focusing on language of labor and class struggles. In a press release, Durham Association of Educators (DAE) president Mika Twietmeyer criticized the state for prioritizing “corporate tax breaks over the basic needs of our children.” Per information from Meta, the NCAE spent at least $7,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads urging North Carolina scrollers to “show up ready to fight for the schools our kids deserve.”
Finnegan said that tone shift is inspired by unions in Chicago, West Virginia, and Los Angeles, where “teachers have shown us that a really powerful public school workers union, united with parents, is the best defense against privatization and also can improve working conditions and learning conditions.”
Local governments—and taxpayers—have “stood in the gap,” said Swanson, when the state neglects to properly fund schools. As school boards look to counties for an increasing share of funding, county commissioners have grimly pondered how much they can continue to raise taxes on residents in order to support education.
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