Editorial: State must pay cost of new teachers its class size cuts demanded

Statewide costs for the required additional teaching slots alone is $300 million.

School systems throughout the state are in the midst of preparing budgets for the new school year. They’re trying to figure out how they will be able to create additional classroom space and hire more teachers.

In Wake County, for example, the total cost would be $320 million to add another 460 teachers and build 400 classrooms. In Moore County, the district would need to hire 36 more teachers and add mobile classrooms, costing $2.9 million.

Those concerns are real – so significant that already 38 school boards around the state have passed resolutions calling on the General Assembly to, at a minimum, relax the class size standards so they can avoid cutting other teachers.

Gov. Cooper last week said that any state-mandated cuts in class size should be coupled with the funding to back it. He’s right and he says he is willing to do that.

Cooper should send the legislature his proposal to address the issue. It may be a problem legislators made, but he should show them how to fix it. If legislators don’t like it, they need to sit down and work with the governor to come up with a consensus solution that fully funds the mandate.

The best and most appropriate relief is to back up the classroom-size mandate without sacrificing any other instruction currently offered or teaching positions that now exist. Additionally, there should be more avenues, perhaps through state lottery funds, to help local schools pay for the added classrooms that are needed.

The legislature needs to fund laws it passes. That would be fair to the schools, students and taxpayers.