‘Recipe for disaster.’ CMS reacts to additional $10 million in one-time county funding
Board of Education Chair Elyse Dashew says Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools desperately needs funding that focuses on “people, not things” and that a newly approved $10 million from county commissioners won’t go far enough to help struggling students.
The Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday tentatively approved an additional $10 million for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, giving the district about $30 million of the roughly $40.4 million increase it requested. Without an investment in recurring funds however, Dashew said the district will struggle to have the “powerful impact” needed to help students struggling from pandemic learning lag.
The $10 million increase, approved as one of many “straw votes,” will be drawn from the county fund balance if the final budget is approved as planned at a June 22 meeting. Dashew said the county’s allocation still falls short of what schools need to serve students and teachers.
“This type of funding is used for programs and ‘things,’ rather than ongoing expenses like salaries for teacher assistants,” Dashew wrote in an email to The Charlotte Observer. “People, not things, will have the most powerful impact in helping our kids recover from the pandemic. We know we need to raise pay in order to fill job vacancies.”
Commissioner Laura Meier said the funds are intended to allow CMS to spend $10 million elsewhere by covering preventative maintenance the schools previously requested money for.
“The idea is that it will free up money that they were using for preventative maintenance to spend on what they want,” Meier said. “Hopefully in my opinion, they need to spend it on teacher assistants.”
At Wednesday’s meeting, Commissioner Vilma Leake said she didn’t feel CMS should receive “another dime” from the county.
“If they were a business, they’d be closed 10 years ago,” Leake said.
School board member Jennifer De La Jara said commissioners’ outlook is marred by a focus on “politics” rather than improving outcomes for CMS’ student body, especially its “historically and contemporarily marginalized” students.
“Hearing that CMS isn’t going to ‘get another dime’ shows us that many of (the) Commissioners are still focused on personalities and politics and not the 140,000 children and 19,000 employees of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools,” De La Jara wrote in an email to the Observer. “This is not about who the Superintendent is or if you like school board members or an intangible ‘district.’ This is about looking at a student body that is 75% Black and Brown and where over 50% of the students live below the poverty line and deciding they are worth it.”
In May, dozens of CMS parents and teachers attended the commissioners’ meeting after the county allocated $557.9 million for CMS operating expenses, about $20 million more than the previous year. But the county allocation fell about $20 million below the schools’ full request. CMS Executive Director of Government Affairs Charles Jeter said schools are receiving well under what they need to address issues like staffing shortages.
“What they did is give us $10 million in one-time, non-recurring funds. You don’t pay recurring expenses with one-time revenue, it’s a recipe for disaster, that’s how businesses go bankrupt. We can’t fund education that way, nobody does it that way,” Jeter said. “Part of the reason we have teacher vacancies is our pay rate. … we need to pay our teachers at the level that we can attract our best and brightest, and that’s not happening.”
A year ago, racial equity and a push to improve its lowest-performing schools led CMS to a bitter funding dispute with commissioners. The county withheld $56 million to encourage school officials to address problems, but county commissioners eventually released the money after a mediation process.
This year, CMS approved a $2.1 billion operating budget, with $578.4 million expected to come from county government.
Jeter said the commissioners’ reasoning for withholding funds from CMS, including high numbers of vacant jobs and low performance of some schools, is counter-intuitive to solving the problem. Without proper funding, positions will remain vacant since CMS can’t pay a competitive wage to fill them, he said.
“There’s an antagonistic attitude against public education right now. Teachers are asked to do a lot of things beyond just teach, so there’s a frustration there,” Jeter said. “It doesn’t do us any good to say we’ve got a job on the books knowing good damn well we don’t pay the job enough to fill that position.”
At Wednesday’s commissioners meeting, Mecklenburg County Manager Dena Diorio said the county could not match CMS’ requested budget without raising taxes or cutting other services. BOCC Chair George Dunlap agreed and said it would be “inappropriate” to further fund CMS by removing funds from other county areas.
While Diorio warned against drawing money from the county fund balance in case of a prolonged recession, Meier said the gesture is a “very, very small ask” to help support teacher assistants in CMS. Hiring teacher assistants to take strain away from teachers, Jeter said, has been especially difficult without proper funding.
De La Jara wrote she hopes the BOCC will reconsider the funding proposal to help CMS address hiring challenges.
“I know they understand the labor market challenges we all face because they have seen fit to raise their own employees to a minimum of $20/hour, yet somehow reject raising the teacher assistants to just $16.50,” de la Jara wrote. “It’s unconscionable, particularly when they criticize CMS for not improving K-3 literacy scores and not hiring a diverse workforce.”
CMS has not considered mediation in this year’s dispute since the budget is not finalized, Jeter said.
“We remain hopeful that they will fully fund our request,” Jeter said. “At the end of the day, we still believe what we asked for is what we need on behalf of the students and staff, and more broadly, the community at large.”
This story was originally published June 17, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
