No new state budget puts schools in tough spot, NC Democrats say
No new state budget for the current fiscal year means schools can’t tell current or prospective employees how much money they’ll be making next month.
That’s making hiring and retaining employees a challenge, while schools are struggling with employee shortages, North Carolina Democrats said Monday.
“We do not know what teachers will be paid,” said Chris Heagarty, a Wake County Board of Education member and former lawmaker. “We don’t know what bus drivers will be paid. In today’s labor market, people aren’t going to wait around to see what they might be paid.”
As the new school year approaches, Democratic state lawmakers, Wake County school board members and Wake County parents urged Republican General Assembly leadership to pass a budget and to keep schools top of mind when doing so.
Rep. Julie von Haefen, D-Wake, said Republicans have been playing into culture wars over racial and LGBTQ issues rather than focusing on pandemic learning recovery or teachers who are working extra hours to cover extra classrooms during a teacher shortage.
“These culture wars divide communities rather than bring us together at a time when we should be united toward a common goal,” von Haefen said.
Currently, Republican lawmakers, who have a supermajority in the General Assembly, are struggling to compromise on proposals related to establishing commercial casinos and whether and how to expand income tax cuts. In the meantime, state agencies and school systems are funded on a continuation budget — the same amount of money they received last year, with the potential for some enrollment-based adjustments.
Reached later Monday, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said lawmakers are “making progress on the budget."
“The folks that are going to get raises will get those raises,” he said. “It's just that they might be delayed a little bit. I don't know that that's something that, as a practical matter, really impairs things.”
It’s not like when lawmakers and Gov. Roy Cooper didn’t agree on a budget in 2019, Berger said. In that case, lawmakers passed a budget but couldn’t overcome a Cooper veto. As a result, employees were on a continuation budget until 2021 and received no raises, including step increases for experience gained during that time.
Currently, a budget is still expected. But the continuation budget still means there are no raises, including step increases for experienced gained, for employees.
The state is constitutionally obligated to fund public education and spends more than $11 billion on public schools. Counties are obligated to fund school facilities, spending more than $1 billion on facilities each year. Counties spend another $3.7 billion on public education for needs the state doesn’t cover, and they are often asking for more state funding.
“It’s easy as a legislator to look at that bottom line, to look at that large number and think it has to be enough,” Heagarty said. But that money gets spent quickly on the state’s 1.5 million public school students.
David Johnson, a parent of four children in the Wake County Public School System, said every teacher his daughter had in kindergarten through sixth grade has quit the school.
An active parent-teacher association member, Johnson said he knows teachers are quitting from burnout, feeling like they aren’t respected and pay isn’t worth it.
“It’s troublesome as a parent to see we are not valuing teachers they way we should,” he said.
He’s worried about the potential academic impact when his children apply to college if the schools in Wake County or North Carolina aren’t seen as high regard.
Johnson also recalled stress throughout the past school year related to his children’s school buses. He and neighbors would scramble to arrange carpools when routes were canceled at the last minute, largely due to an ever-worsening bus driver shortage. When his kids did get picked up, he said they’d spend more than an hour riding it one way.
The number of school bus-certified drivers in North Carolina is plummeting as public agencies nationwide struggle to attract drivers and private businesses are pushing wages upward — in the transportation and delivery industry and beyond — in a hiring frenzy.
The Wake County school system and others have been raising driver pay using local funding in the past two years. In Wake County, starting wages have risen from $15 per hour to $17.20 per hour.
Bus driver starting pay was set to increase from $17.20 per hour to $17.89 per hour this school year, and pay for all years of experience was set to rise by 4%. The school board hasn’t funded their pay raises yet, or the raises anyone else is scheduled receive, either. That’s because the school board uses county money for the extra wages on top of state dollars. The school board doesn’t know what the budget implications will be yet from any state budget, so it, like the state, is operating on a continuation budget — the exact same budget as last year.
Heagarty said that’s because the state budget can have unexpected financial implications that can derail plans. A proposed limit on class sizes in third through fifth grades, which was posed in the House budget, would have significant financial ramifications next year, Heagarty said, with the potential need to hire more teachers, buy trailers for more classrooms, move more schools to year-round calendars or reassign students in western Wake County out east.
The planned-for raise in the school board’s budget could amount to about $1,000 or more for bus drivers in a 10-month contract. Average bus driver pay in the district is just more than $24,000.
Wake County is often seen as the envy of most counties, which are less populated and lower in property tax wealth. The county’s relative wealth, however, means it receives less money from the state — 113th out of 115 school systems — and relies on local funding to ascend to 83rd among all 115 school systems in per student spending.
A rising concern among school board members is that many school employees can’t afford to live in Wake County. So if a neighboring county can compete with Wake County’s wages, employees might leave to go work closer to where they live.
Laura Leslie, WRAL Capitol Bureau Chief, contributed to this report.
