Charlotte teachers hold protest before school Friday, call for more state funding
Charlotte parents and educators gathered early Friday to call for more investment in public education ahead of next week’s march in Raleigh for the same cause.
Students, parents and educators gathered before school across the street from Oaklawn Language Academy, north of uptown. Afterward, teachers and students entered the campus together, signs in hand, as part of a demonstration organizers called a “walk-in.”
“Here we are, educators and parents, getting ready to walk in and do the work of public education while we feel the General Assembly has turned their backs and is walking away,” Erin DeMund, an Oaklawn teacher and organizer of the event, told The Charlotte Observer.
The demonstration comes a week before a march that’s caused at least nine school districts statewide to cancel classes due to a high volume of time off requests.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education voted late Friday morning to cancel classes May 1 due to 2,622 of the district’s around 9,000 total teachers requesting leave. On May 1 last year, for comparison, there were 1,210 teacher absences.
Attendees of the Oaklawn rally held signs that read “Fund our future” and “NC is #50 out of 50.” That’s a reference to a 2025 report from the Education Law Center, which found North Carolina is last in the percentage of the state’s wealth that goes toward K-12 public education.
“The beauty of public education is that it belongs to all of us,” said Raquel Rhodes, a teacher at Oaklawn. “North Carolina, the state with the seventh-best economy in the country, shouldn’t tolerate being 50th in funding.”
The May 1 rally
The protest on May 1 in Raleigh will happen at the state capitol just days after lawmakers returned for this year’s short legislative session.
North Carolina remains the only state in the country to have yet to pass a budget for the current fiscal year, which began in July. Without one, state employees like public school teachers have gone without a state pay raise this school year. The next fiscal year starts in just a few months.
The House and Senate remain divided on raises for school staff.
The House’s budget includes an average raise for teachers of 8.7%, bringing beginning teacher pay to $50,000 and restoring increased pay for teachers with master’s degrees.
“I can tell you, from the House side…we want meaningful raises,” Republican State Rep. Brian Biggs of Randolph County said April 7. “Education, to me, is not something we can trade off or something we can negotiate.”
The Senate’s proposed raises for teachers, however, are less robust, coming in at an average of 2.3% and bringing beginning teacher pay to $41,510. Its plan does not include increased pay for educators with master’s degrees.
Meanwhile, Gov. Josh Stein’s proposed “critical needs budget” aligns more closely with the House’s vision, calling for a 13% increase to beginning teacher pay – which currently sits at $41,000 – and an average pay raise of 5.8% for teachers. It also calls for reinstatement of higher pay for teachers with master’s degrees.
“There are a few issues that are in dispute between the House and the Senate. I believe that we need to set the state up for long-term fiscal success,” Stein said April 16 in Davidson. “There were definitely elements of the House budget that I thought positioned the state much better than in the Senate.”
The May 1 rally is also taking place one month after the NC Supreme Court overturned a 2022 decision in the 32-year-old Leandro case that would’ve required the state to transfer hundreds of millions in additional dollars to public schools.
“The state needs to be doing better,” Elizabeth Bertke, an Oaklawn instructional specialist and parent told The Observer Friday. “This is about access to quality education, which is a basic right that we all have.”
This story was originally published April 24, 2026 at 11:28 AM.
