Last spring, thousands of teachers throughout North Carolina found pink slips in their boxes, informing them of impending job losses in the 2010-11 school year. Protest marches occurred and a media blitz ensued, with newspapers across the state deeming the action of school boards as “catastrophic” and “disastrous.”
As the hoopla subsided, however, most school boards quietly finalized their operating budgets and hired many of those same teachers back into the classrooms.
This year, most school districts across North Carolina recalled a majority of their pink-slipped teachers, minimizing classroom losses before Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called lawmakers back from their summer vacations in August to approve an emergency $10 billion spending package on public education.
The additional funds from Congress were on top of the $100 billion the U.S. Department of Education received through the recent stimulus bill, and billions of dollars in “Race to the Top” education funding.
“It happens all the time,” said Lindsey Burke, education policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “School districts send out all of these pink slips before their budgets are final, then they rescind them. They are creating a crisis.”
Guilford County Schools is one example. It was reported that 160 teachers were going to lose their jobs for the 2010-11 school year. However, Laurie Hogan, program administrator for communications in the district, said the layoffs never transpired.
“We waited until the budget unfolded and most of the teachers were rehired,” she said. “The rest left the school system through normal attrition, retirement and the population in schools changing.
In addition to the large infusion of federal money, totaling $380 million for North Carolina, state Sen. Richard Stevens, R-Wake, co-chairman of the Senate Education/Higher Education Committee, said the state shifted $120 million from lottery funds to pay teacher salaries.
Burke said such cost-shifting is an insufficient fix, putting a band aid on what could become a fatal fiscal wound.
“The bailout just exacerbates the problem,” she said. “It stops school boards from creating reform and easing the taxpayers burden by better targeting resources and reducing spending.”
Stevens agreed.
“It’s a half-billion dollars,” he said. “It was important for us to give the monies this year, but it put off for another year how the state is going to pay for the positions next year. It’s a temporary solution. We don’t know what’s going to happen in 2011. There’s going to be tough choices.”
Burke said drastic cuts are needed, as the growing number of administrators is creating top-heavy staffing in school districts. If administrative staffs were reduced, she said, there would be enough funding in place to keep teachers in the classrooms, instead of announcing layoffs that may or may not be rescinded.
Even though K-12 student enrollment hasn’t increased nationwide since the 1970s, Burke said, non-teaching staff positions have surged by 83 percent over that time. The percentage of instructional staff at schools has shrunk in recent years, from 70 percent to 51 percent.
“Lack of funding isn’t what plagues public education,” she said. “There’s just more and more administrators added to school systems and less and less classroom teachers. It‘s really jarring when you think of it that way. There is room to stop education spending that would stop the bleeding and not jeopardize teachers or the classroom. They need to stop the continual hiring of non-teaching positions. It’s a festering, unsustainable plan.”
Hans Plotseneder, a business and German teacher at West Mecklenburg High School in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, said he decided to run for the school board in 2011 because of the waste he has witnessed in his decade of teaching in the school system.
“There are 9,000 non-classroom personnel in the CMS district,” he said. “Out of this, there are more than 1,700 administrators in the downtown office. If you compare this to any other company of the same size across the United States, [it] would have 150 people in corporate headquarters. It is a total waste of money.”
Plotseneder said he was appalled when 600 teachers were given notice last spring that they would have to vacate their positions. Meantime, administrative positions remained virtually untouched. He said CMS could streamline its administration instead of laying off teachers.
Plotseneder also noted that the school district used tax dollars to hire a consulting company that concluded cutting administrative overhead personnel was not an option.
Although CMS ended up hiring back 140 teachers before the state and federal governments offered bailout funds, he said they failed to bring back more teachers after deferring up to 80 percent of the federal and state funding until the 2011-12 school year.
“Only 20 percent of the monies given for this year have been used,” Plotseneder said. “They are holding back a big portion. They got the money, but they didn’t fund the positions or the classrooms that they were supposed to. Keeping the funds untouched is their plan to keep the administration intact. It doesn‘t add up.”
Karen Welsh is a contributor to Carolina Journal.