Are we really begging for money for CMS teaching assistants?

May 25, 2022 was one of the sadder days that I’ve experienced in recent memory. News steadily trickled out about an 18-year-old Uvalde, Texas student’s massacre at an elementary school, with 19 fourth graders and two teachers shot to death while parents were forced to wait outside helplessly.

Yet another cohort of students and teachers would struggle to see the schoolhouse as a place of sanctity and security as it became another site of trauma, in a nation with no shortage of such sites.

While this reality was sad enough, it hit me that on the day after this event I and others were sitting in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center chambers with educators begging our county government to fully fund Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ budget request.

Teachers, administrators, faith leaders, CMS Equity Committee representatives, nonprofit leaders who serve our children, and those with business ties were lobbying the county to allocate money to raise teacher assistant pay to $16.50 per hour without cutting another essential school service.

Yes, you read that right. In a county as expensive as Mecklenburg County, whose fiscal 2022-23 budget appropriately raises the minimum wage for county employees to $20, we were begging for the money to hopefully retain teaching assistants for $3.50 an hour less and pretending as though it’s complicated.

This was the same day that these CMS educators had to return to school, foregoing their own safety concerns while reassuring our children about their safety. They supported the children through self-esteem defining standardized tests and spent more awake time with students that day than they likely did with their own families. Then, they spent their evening at the Government Center begging for appropriate funding to do their jobs — looking for a signal that we value the people who provide education to 72% of Mecklenburg County’s youth ages 5 to 18.

I listened as a teaching assistant, who was about the age of my mom, a retired educator, passionately discussed working two jobs while tracking down a chronically absent student by going to his house.

I heard one administrator say, that in terms of wages, schools were competing with fast-food service businesses for staffing.

Just weeks earlier, my son had told me that the Black male teaching assistant he had been excited about all year — his first Black male educator — was not returning because he said he needed to make more money and was becoming a social worker. Being familiar with starting pay for social workers, that stung.

My son’s first grade teacher left the year before, as she could not afford to live near the school, despite leaving school nightly to work evenings at a restaurant and bar. At age 8, my son has already learned how little our state and county have shown itself to value educators.

A response some have is that CMS is such a large part of the county budget. Logically, educating and developing three-quarters of the county’s youth for 13 years is our largest allocation. In fiscal 2001, the CMS allocation was 45.1% of our county’s total revenue. And that was without charter school funding requirements and as contentious of a state government. Even with growing revenue, it has now dropped to 41.6%. If the standards set forth in 2001 remained, CMS should be getting $54 million more from the county, not $20 million.

For all the discourse recently about equity, there is little that better addresses school equity than teaching assistants in the first few school years. Deciding to underinvest in our schools is deciding to increase the market for Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden’s jails. Our kids and community deserve better.