Tuesday night, the Wake County School Board voted unenthusiastically to approve an annual budget that includes about $10 million in cuts. The board members did not mince words as they blamed the state legislature for forcing the austerity measures. (North Carolina ranks 50th in the nation for cost-adjusted per-pupil public school funding.)
“I cannot articulate my rage at the North Carolina General Assembly for what they have done with the erosion of public school funding in this state over the last decade-plus,” said board member Lynn Edmonds.
But most of the board agreed they can live with this budget under the circumstances.
“This is one of the hardest decisions ever,” said board member Jennifer Job. “It is—I want to be very clear—the best allocation of the extremely limited funding that is being made available.”
The vote was 7-2, with board members Cheryl Caulfield and Christina Gordon voting against. Caulfield said the board didn’t get enough time to consider and adjust Superintendent Robert P. Taylor’s budget proposal before the vote, especially since Taylor’s first draft just four weeks ago included cuts to special education that the entire board found unacceptable. Gordon said the budget fell short of what students and teachers deserve.
The school board approved a total operating budget of $2.3 billion, about the same as the current fiscal year. The board is requesting $768 million from Wake County, which represents a $25.3 million increase from this year. Based on Monday night’s Board of County Commissioners meeting, the county is prepared to fund that amount. Additional funding will come from the state and federal governments.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because the school board has been here before. Last year, they approved $19 million in budget cuts under very similar political and fiscal circumstances (though commissioners ended up giving them an extra $5 million at the eleventh hour). The school board agonized over the cuts, which that year included funding for administrator and nurse positions, teacher pay raises, and school supplies. Caulfield and Gordon (and their colleague Wing Ng) voted against the budget. Their peers who voted “yes” did so reluctantly.
A perfect storm of factors made this year’s Wake County schools budget “the absolute worst,” to borrow board member Sam Hershey’s words from Tuesday. Inflation is making everything more expensive. Aging infrastructure around the district needs replacing. Gas prices are high and climbing. The state doesn’t have a comprehensive budget, making estimates of how much it will contribute to local public schools next fiscal year provisional at best. The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) must give a portion of its budget away to charter schools, per the state legislature. And the county commissioners (who would love to fully fund WCPSS in theory) are ill-equipped to plug the resulting budget hole because they are mired in a budgetary quagmire of their own this year.
The school board aimed to reduce administrative and behind-the-scenes costs before touching any academic programs. But WCPSS’s student-facing programs weren’t totally unscathed in the cuts. The district will, for example, shrink its budget for elementary literacy coaches by $2.2 million.
“I think some of our most vulnerable are going to be left behind by this budget, especially when it comes to literacy coaches,” Job said. “Just because a school has 70 or 80% reading proficiency … that’s still two or three kids out of every 10 that are not [proficient]. And reading is the heart of education and how you learn from then on.”
Here’s a non-comprehensive list of some of the funding cuts and increases the Wake school board approved on Tuesday.
Cuts:
- $2.2 million cut from the budget for elementary literacy coaches
- $2.5 million cut from the transportation budget
- $1.2 million from the budget for high school assistant principals
- $836,489 cut by eliminating seven vacant Central Services positions
- $523,000 cut from Central Services’ non-personnel budget
- $811,000 cut from dental plan costs, achieved by adjusting coverage from four to two cleanings per year
- $1.1 million cut from the budget for extra duty pay
Funding increases:
- $14 million for employee pay raises, partly in response to anticipated legislation and partly to increase local salary supplements for employees with master’s degrees and licensed employees.
- $11.8 million for legislature-mandated charter school funding and retirement and insurance matching
- $3.4 million for new schools and school calendar changes
- $7.9 million to maintain teacher positions previously funded by grants
- $1.6 million toward rising real estate and property insurance costs
The Wake County Board of Commissioners will vote on whether to approve WCPSS’s $768 million local funding request on June 1. Taylor and the school board members indicated they have been in close contact with county staff and commissioners and believe they are asking for as much as the county is able to give them.
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