NC schools get $395.8M for construction, must cover $3.3M for teacher bonus

New lottery-funded grants will contribute to school construction projects in 28 school districts, the state announced this week.

The awards range from $514,000 to the Tyrrell County Schools to $40 million to Northampton County Schools. The median award was $13 million.

The fund, created by lawmakers in 2017, has awarded $739 million in the past five years for 60 construction projects in the state’s K-12 schools, according to a Department of Public Instruction news release.

Still, counties spend more than $3 billion on education each year, while the state funds $60 million in capital projects each year. The new state budget will increase the’s state’s capital spending by about $60 million.

Federal COVID-19 stimulus dollars covered $109.5 million toward a $1,000 bonus for the state’s teachers and instructional support professionals this spring, but it wasn’t quite enough.

The bonus was only for teachers and instructional support personnel who are funded by the state, which is most but not all of the state’s teachers and instructional support professionals.

The new budget passed by the General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Roy Cooper last November set aside $100 million of the state’s $360 million in stimulus funds from the American Rescue Plan. (North Carolina schools received $3.6 billion, and the state received a 10% match that has mostly been used to fund programs schools can apply to participate in.)

The budget also allowed the Department of Public Instruction to use a handful of other stimulus funds that schools didn’t apply for. The department did that, receiving State Board of Education approval along the way, but only came up with an extra $9.5 million.

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Schools will have to cover the remaining $3.3 million that the Department of Public Instruction will not reimburse them for.

Alexis Schauss, DPI’s chief financial officer, told the State Board of Educaiton this week that schools often used federal stimulus funds to cover the bonuses, and the bonuses are an allowable expense of those funds.

North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services officials are developing a plan to improve and increase access to mental health services for young people, Charlene Wong, assistant secretary for children and families at DHHS, told the State Board of Education on Thursday.

DHHS leaders want to increase children’s access to mental health services by expanding their availability in schools, primary care clinic and specialty care clinics.

Wong said the effort is relatively new but addresses an issue that’s been worsening for more than a decade: More and more young people reporting feeling hopeless or contemplating suicide.

“Unfortunately this was already happening before the pandemic,” Wong said.

The COVID-19 pandemic made problems worse, experts say, as school closures, event cancellations and death isolated people and shut down some positive parts of life. In North Carolina, public middle and high schools could not open for daily in person learning until March 2021, a year after they closed. DHHS was among the health organizations that urged the closures to prevent virus spread, overcrowding of hospitals and higher death tolls.

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“Feeling close to people at school provides really important protection or students,” Wong said. Survey results show students who felt close to people at school had lower rates of feeling hopeless or suicidal.

The effort to leverage schools as a place to provide health to North Carolina children — and children nationwide — is a growing approach to closing gaps in coverage caused in part by struggles to access care. Experts say schools are a prime place to serve children, because they are all there most days of the week.

North Carolina schools are often now Medicaid providers, allowing them to be reimbursed for providing healthcare services at schools, administered by healthcare professionals. State legislation last year allows charter schools to now become Medicaid providers.

A 2008 report from DHHS showed $15 million in Medicaid spending in North Carolina schools during the 2006-07 fiscal year, serving 17,285 children.

Data analyzed by WRAL News show Medicaid reimbursement for school-based services totaled $135.4 million in 2020. Data on the number of students served, or how much of it was for mental health services, is unknown.

Those worsened during the pandemic nationally, according to the presentation. Wong said the trend occurred across demographics and hit female youth and LGBTQ+ youth worse than others.

In North Carolina, the department estimates, based on reports, that the number of young people with a major depressive episode rose by 46% and the rate of children discharged from emergency departments with a newly diagnosed mental health condition rose by 70%. The department also cited a report that used demographic data on those who died of COVID-19 and the demographic data of children in the state to estimate that more 3,600 North Carolina children likely lost a caregiver to COVID-19.

The department, working with other stakeholders in mental health, is identifying potential programs, projects and problems to solve, Wong said.

So far, DHHS officials believe some existing programs, such as partnerships between schools and care providers and social-emotional learning efforts, would be beneficial to build upon. Social-emotional learning refers to the exploring emotions during everyday work in the classroom; that can take many shapes when done in a classroom, including having a discussion time on what kids are thinking about or talking about what characters in books are feeling.

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Wong noted that mental health supports can improve, too, because many groups aren’t working together who could benefit from partnerships and because funding and personnel shortages can make higher caseloads challenging.

Some steps DHHS has taken in recent years that Wong said could be expanded: