The Wake County Board of Education came together to discuss the proposed $25.3M budget that was sent and approved by the Wake County Board of Commissioners.
The budget is intended to be used for funding, but it will also reduce allocations and eliminate systems that were previously funded. Things like literacy coaches in elementary schools will lose supportive funding, high school staffing formulas will be changed, plus support to tutors will be relinquished from departmental funds.
Board of Education Chair Tyler J. Swanson said, “North Carolina ranks 43rd nationally in average teacher pay and last in both per-pupil funding and education spending as a percentage of GDP. For a state that frequently promotes itself as first in business, continuing to rank near the bottom in public education investment should concern all of us. This is not just a policy issue. It is a moral issue.”
This truth puts into perspective the necessity of having a budget improvement.
Swanson said, “This is the budget we must recommend, not the budget we choose to recommend.”
North Carolina is not getting the resources it needs to sustain a fully functioning educational system. Moreso, it has been made clear that Swanson and the rest of the board feel that special education funding has been undervalued by the Wake County Board of Commissioners.
During a public hearing meeting, the Wake County Board of Commissioners Financial Officer Trisha Posey said, “Every contract is written for services to support our kids if they are direct service contracts. Those expenditures were to support student education services. It has to be supplementary. We can pay for teachers on the federal funds just as we can pay for teachers on state and local. As long as we show that we are increasing in our state and local and not in the federal relative to state and local.”
Wake County Public Schools has been in need of a funding increase due to information that misled our Board of Education. The miscommunication between these two boards has put a gap in the budget and this proposal is a new step in the right direction.
