State will use reserves for promised $1,000 teacher bonus after budget funds fall short

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction will have to use a reserve fund to cover all of the $1,000 bonuses for teachers included in the new state budget.

DPI, in a memo to schools, estimates the federal COVID-19 stimulus funding that’s been set aside for the bonuses will only cover about 80% of the potentially 100,000 teachers who likely qualify for the bonuses.

In that memo, sent last week, department officials initially told schools they didn’t know how the shortfall would be resolved.

A department spokesman told WRAL News on Monday that a “reserve fund has been held to provide additional funds.” It’s not yet clear how much money is in that reserve fund or from where it would come.

The budget allocates $100 million of the state’s portion of federal coronavirus relief funds for the bonuses. DPI calculated how much funding would be allotted for the bonuses and how much would be needed, based on December payroll, just before the holidays, notifying schools of the shortage on Dec. 29.

“School business cannot provide any information as to whether the funding shortfalls will or will not be addressed and [public school units] should plan accordingly,” the department wrote to schools in the Dec. 29 message.

Schools must identify how many employees qualify for the bonuses and apply to the state to use the funds — the typical process for using COVID-19 stimulus funds.

The bonuses are meant for any teacher or instructional support personnel whose salary comes in part from state funds and who is employed as of Jan. 1, 2022. Because the funding is from COVID-19 stimulus funding, those employees must have also participated in at least one training, between March 12, 2020 and Jan. 1, 2022, on “the mitigation of COVID-19 in public schools, learning loss resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, or virtual instruction needed because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to DPI.

The budget requires the bonuses by paid by Jan. 31.

The state funded about 82,000 full-time teachers during the 2020-21 school year, according to DPI data. It funded about 15,000 teacher assistants and several thousands more instructional support professionals, such as guidance counselors.

The budget for this year and next is the first passed by lawmakers and signed by Gov. Roy Cooper since 2018.

The budget includes other bonuses for teachers funded in other ways.

It provides $1,500 to any state employee — which includes most teachers — earning less than $75,000 annually. It also provides a $300 bonus for teachers whose salaries are paid by the state, paid for using re-purposed merit pay that can’t be distributed because of insufficient accountability data caused by COVID-19 learning disruptions.

The budget permits DPI to use any leftover stimulus funds as of March 15 to make up for any shortfall.

Leftover stimulus funds from local schools revert to the state if not used by their deadline. But the state has been urging schools to use their funds before those deadlines, and how much is leftover from the Dec. 31 spending deadline isn’t yet known.

According to DPI data, not much is left of the pandemic stimulus funds that needed to be spent by Dec. 31. Only about $5 million in pandemic stimulus funds remained unused as of Nov. 30 (about 1.6% of those funds). Other funds don’t expire until Sept. 30 of this year, 2023 and 2024, depending on the stimulus package they were in.