A retreat for public school teachers is retooling its focus after the Republican-controlled state legislature sliced the organization’s budget in half.
With locations in the mountains and on the coast, the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching has served for more than 25 years as a coveted destination for educators. But with a 50-percent budget cut authorized by the General Assembly this year, big changes are in the cards.
In the near term, NCCAT’s slashed budget will mean fewer five-day seminars, more on-site training for teachers in school districts, and ramped up private fundraising. It’s also meant dozens of layoffs over the past two years.
Before the cuts, NCCAT had drawn $6.1 million in taxpayer funds from the legislature and served as many as 5,000 teachers per year. Educators don’t pay their own way; NCCAT picks up the tab for them to attend, including the expense of finding substitutes to handle their classrooms back home.
Critics, including Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, have said the money should be spent elsewhere during lean fiscal times — the legislature faced a $2.5-billion budget gap this fiscal year — and that NCCAT is a luxury rather than a necessity.
As Carolina Journal reported in 2009, the teacher retreat has many accommodations of a mountain resort, including a 48-room lodge, indoor amphitheater, a health and wellness facility, an extensive art collection, and even a Hershey’s Kiss on each teacher’s pillow in the morning.
Budget woes
The teacher retreat went through several iterations of cuts during budget negotiations earlier this year. In her proposed spending plan, Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue suggested a 10 percent reduction, but initial House spending targets would have zeroed-out the center. A final compromise between the House and Senate cut the appropriation by half — about $3 million each year.
NCCAT’s top staff say the cuts came as a surprise. “We anticipated different scenarios, but did we go that deep? No. I don’t think we saw that coming,” said Elizabeth Gillespie, communications coordinator for the center.
“It was too deep [but] you deal with what you’re given,” said Elaine Franklin, who took over as NCCAT’s executive director in April.
The cutbacks already have prompted NCCAT staff to cancel 17 of 27 seminars scheduled for the fall 2011 semester. The remaining seminars include “Strategies for Motivating African American Students,” “Move It! The Physically Active Academic Classroom,” and “Teaching the Holocaust: Resources and Reflections.”
Instead of relying on the seminar model, which Gillespie described as “very expensive,” NCCAT staff will begin providing on-site services to school districts across the state. Exactly what that will look like is still up for discussion.
“We’re trying to adapt on the fly and be as flexible as possible to best serve the schools in North Carolina,” Gillespie said.
Staff cutbacks
NCCAT has laid off around 35 employees since mid-2009. The most recent reductions chiefly came from dining workers (NCCAT’s mountain location has a multilevel dining room that looks out on the Appalachian Mountains) and program associates, who assisted with seminar development.
Gillespie said that all departments have been cut. “No department has been exempt,” she said.
Partly as a result of the cutbacks, NCCAT promoted five employees to fill vacant positions and gave corresponding pay raises. Another two employees also had salary bumps to reflect additional job duties.
“Those positions that we really try to preserve are those that are responsible for developing curricula and delivering programs to teachers,” Franklin said.
Franklin began her tenure as NCCAT’s leader with an annual starting salary of $125,000. Before joining the teacher-training center, she served as director for the Center for Mathematics and Science Education at Western Carolina University, where she earned $78,561 per year.
Franklin replaced Mary McDuffie, who served as NCCAT’s executive director for eight years. As of December 2009, McDuffie was the highest paid state employee in the Department of Public Instruction at an annual salary of $175,137.
New emphasis
Aside from on-site training, Franklin said that NCCAT would focus on charter schools after the General Assembly lifted the 100-school cap this year.
“We want to really emphasize that we are here for charter schools and want to help them get ramped up, particularly for those new ones,” she said.
Teacher retention initiatives also will get renewed focus. “We don’t want to retain just any teacher,” Gillespie said. “We want to make sure that the teachers that are retained are doing great work with the students — that they are excited and inspired and that the kids are really becoming life-long learners.”
David N. Bass is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.