CHCCS budget cuts: Here’s what doesn’t make sense to me right now

On Wednesday, the school board held a special meeting to discuss their plan to eliminate administrative and staff positions in order to balance the budget, which is in pretty dire shape. The vote was 4-3, with Fedders, Fornville, and Dasi opposing the plan. Chapelboro’s Brighton McConnell has a great straight news write up of the meeting – he really did a great job capturing the details.

Online, there’s been a lot of confusion, and rightfully so. This feels sudden, and right before school starts and also hard to parse. Parents and teachers are asking good, tough questions about how all of this went down, and why and what needs to change.

A few thoughts:

First, we have 20 hard questions about all of this out to School Board Chair George Griffin and will publish answers as soon as we receive them. (Update: Interview here.)

Second, I know I say this every single week, but the Republican-dominated North Carolina General Assembly’s assault on public education shows no signs of letting up, and it’s getting increasingly tough to run a high-achieving, equitable district in this environment. Please check your voter registration to ensure you are registered to vote, and please read our interviews with candidates in this election cycle.

I follow the CHCCS school board closely – I watch all of their meetings and I believe that the board and district leaders are people operating in good faith.  But I also believe that it’s important to hold people in power to account and ask tough questions.

Here are the things that currently don’t make sense to me:

Timing: If we’ve known we were on a bad downward trajectory for at least two years, shouldn’t there have been hiring freezes earlier, more gradually, and not one week before school starts? Shouldn’t staff have been given more than three days – not even three business days, three days – to decide whether to take their new positions, nearly all of which were demotions and many of which came with substantial pay cuts?

Audits: The district engaged two different consultants to conduct audits: a March 2022 equity audit and a May 2023 curriculum and instruction audit. The audits addressed critical, long-standing issues that have affected the district for a long time.

At the meeting last week, we didn’t hear evidence that the audits’ findings were incorporated in the decision-making about which staff positions would be subject to a reduction in force. If anything, it seems like many of the cuts from central office and in the schools will work to the detriment of equity. School Board member Vickie Feaster Fornville pointed out that the federal programs coordinator position would be dropped in Tier II cuts; that’s a position that ensures that kids in foster care and kids who are unhoused receive the services they need.

Coordination: In May, the school board voted to align the four high schools’ schedules, effective in the 2025-26 school year. The district has said that this will open up opportunities for students to cross-enroll. It can help students moving in from out of district in the middle of the school year, since they won’t have to wait until the end of an entire academic year to finish one of their courses. It will especially help students new to the country who are learning English in high school, since they can get their mandatory 4 credits of English quicker. Lots of school districts have block schedules, including in Wake and Durham. But this change will require a decent amount of coordination and work from the Instructional Services, Equity and Engagement Division to pull this off. And that division took quite a hit in the reduction of force plan.

Technology: The district has invested in a lot of technology, including new smart boards for classrooms, along with 1:1 IPads starting in kindergarten. This technology can facilitate more creative teaching and enhance learning. But it needs to be incorporated into the curriculum thoughtfully, and that often requires the assistance of staff with expertise in instructional technology. That’s especially important given that the May 2023 curriculum and instruction audit of our district observed technology going unused or poorly used. In the plan that passed last week, 10 instruction technology facilitators are going to be cut. These are the folks who help teachers figure out how to integrate technology into lessons. They also help librarians – who, at the elementary level, are already without assistants.

County Commissioner role:  What role does the county play as a backstop for the school board?

In 2021, the Board of County Commissioners did not fully fund the annual continuation budget of the school district. School Board Chair George Griffin has told us that this was because the district “had a fund balance” and were told “that as long as we had a fund balance we were not going to get fully funded.” Griffin also said that the commissioners “also promised that if we ever had a catastrophe, e.g., a roof blew off, they would step in and cover it. Therefore, we ‘did not need a fund balance.’ So we began to spend it down as directed. We raised teacher supplements 2%, an additional 2% for Exceptional Children teachers, and implemented a 5.5% salary raise for all classified employees in conjunction with a new pay scale. We raised bus driver pay to $20.00/hr instead of changing elementary school start times to earlier than it is now. We did other things. During all this time we have had many frank “discussions” with the commissioners.”

Griffin also told us: “Related to all of this is our special district tax – begun in 1909….In a perfect world,  this special tax is a SUPPLEMENTAL tax, however, some see it as a way to SUPPLANT the lack of fully funding our continuation budget. With all that said, our Board of County Commissioners is very pro- education and very supportive of both school systems. I’m not blaming them at all. We have to live within our means, and right now it means trimming recurring costs.”

I think this needs to be teased out more because I’m very confused. It doesn’t seem fair that funding from  the special district tax is slowly morphing into something that supplants rather than supplements. Also, if they were told to spend down and did, then why aren’t the commissioners stepping in? I watched the May 2022 meeting of the county commissioners where funding was discussed — minutes are here — and lots of smart parents and teachers spoke up. I was most struck by Brian Link, the president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Association of Educators who pointed out that the BOCC gave education a higher percentage in the 1980s and 1990s than they did in 2022 to education. 

Is that because the state is giving them less? Is it some miscommunication? What am I missing? And what is the point of building up a big fund balance again (which was stated reason for cuts) if the county commissioners are going to use it as justification for not fully finding the continuation budget? (I have an email out to the chair of the county commissioners to set up a conversation and will share what I learn.)

Communications: It is clear that there are some people who are acting in good faith and confused, and also some people who seemingly want to burn it all down or have an ax to grind, and they’re pretty loud about it online.

Treating individual schools as untouchable or calling for recall elections if a school is affected by change is harmful. Parents threatening to pull their kids if they don’t like something threatens funding for our entire district, because of the way that school funding works in the United States. Public education is set up so that individual choices by parents are adversarial to the system as a whole. Unenrollment can create a spiral effect – parents with means leave, more cuts, parents with means leave, more cuts. Schools in North Carolina have been underfunded for decades, compounding this cycle. (And all of this sits within the historical context of segregation. CHCCS was actively trying to build segregated elementary schools years after Brown v. Board.)  As Randi Weingarten has pointed out, “This is how a democracy comes apart.”

This is a broad challenge that public school districts across North Carolina are facing, and we need to talk about how to address funding challenges broadly. (It’s not going to stop with this budget or this year.)

What can we do to create action around changing things at the state level?

I would love to work with parents across the district who want to help organize, donate, and create change. There are many organizations already doing this work — what are the best ones to plug into?

I say this as a parent of a person who started kindergarten this year. (I also have a 2nd grader.) I will be in this district for the next 13 years, so I’m here for the long haul. I know many of you are too. Email [email protected] if you’re interested in organizing beyond our district, and/or have resources to share with the rest of us.

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For community members, here’s the latest letter (8/22) from the school district:

This message is being sent to all CHCCS staff and families. It is an update to our July 19 and Aug. 16 communications on the district’s financial situation.

Wednesday night, at a Special Call meeting of the Board of Education, the Board made a difficult decision to approve the next two tiers of district administration’s plan to address our current budget situation. The plan is explained in detail in these presentation materials, but in short, it:

• Calls for cuts to 24 full-time central office positions, effective immediately, with impacted staff being reassigned to open positions elsewhere in CHCCS.
• Calls for the reorganization or restructuring of additional school-based positions by the end of the 2024-25 school year.

Why is this happening? Today CHCCS is a district of approximately 11,000 students, but we are still staffed for our pre-pandemic enrollment of more than 12,000 students. Given the realities of per-pupil funding formulas, inflationary factors and more, we are working to restructure our school district for long-term financial sustainability. Answers to other important questions are included at the bottom of this message (We also recommend that you watch and listen to the entire discussion, which we’ve posted to our YouTube page.)

Like you, we too understand how heartbreaking of a situation this is for so many caring and dedicated staff who are impacted. Please support one another as we navigate this most difficult time, as we reshape in order to deliver on the promise of a Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools education.

Sincerely,

George W. Griffin, Ph.D., Board Chair

Riza Jenkins, J.D., M.B.A., Board Vice Chair

Nyah D. Hamlett, Ed. D., Superintendent

Answers to important questions

Q: What is the main issue? 

A: Since COVID, CHCCS student enrollment has declined by approximately 1,000 students. As a result, we lose state per-pupil funding in excess of $8 million annually. This, coupled with other factors means we are spending more than we are allocated by Orange County and the state of North Carolina. We have advocated for plans to address this foreseeable situation since the fall of 2022.

Q: During this time, did we maintain our staffing at the same or higher levels, even as enrollment was declining?

A: Yes, because we believe in doing everything we can to preserve the best possible student experience.

Q: As you reported this situation to Orange County in 2022, the Board of Commissioners was directing CHCCS to spend down its fund balance (also known as a “rainy day fund”). What did you spend the fund balance on?

A: We invested in our staff, which comprises approximately 85% of our total budget.

• We used our fund balance to raise our certified staff supplement rates to be among the highest in North Carolina.
• We also provided for an additional 2% increase in supplements for all certified staff working with Exceptional Children.
• Funds were also allocated to increase classified pay providing an average 5.1% beyond the raises that were funded by North Carolina, positively affecting over 550 of our classified staff.
• We used it to raise bus driver pay to a minimum starting rate of $20/hour in the Spring of 2023 to combat critical shortages.

Q: What else were you spending the money on?

A: CHCCS provides staffing and services that far exceed what’s funded by the state, or what you will find in neighboring school districts. Also, the cost of insurance, utilities (lights, heating, air conditioning, etc.) and materials are rising just like they are for you at home.

Q: You cut 24 positions from “Lincoln Center”. Why don’t you just cut Lincoln Center even more?

A: Lincoln Center accounts for about 3.3% of total full-time positions in CHCCS, yet the cuts approved Wednesday account for 40% of the total personnel cuts across the district. Despite this disproportionate impact, we reluctantly accept it in order to preserve the classroom experience of our students as best we can. All impacted Lincoln Center staff were offered open positions elsewhere in CHCCS.

Q: Tier Three cuts impact school-based and student-facing positions. What if these Tier Three cuts are not made?

A: We would anticipate overspending and amassing debt of another $6,000,000 next year.

Q: Doesn’t state law require CHCCS to have a balanced budget?

A: Yes. We know we’re operating at a deficit now. We are working toward balancing that budget.

Q: Is that an immediate problem or a future one?

A: We feel it is a dire problem right now.

Q: So, what if CHCCS took no action? What’s the worst case scenario if we are not fiscally compliant?

A: Paychecks would bounce for every employee in the district. Also, the district would be in violation of state law requiring a balanced budget.

Q: Can’t you cut more of your contracted services?

A: There are not nearly enough cuts that can be made without severely impacting student services. The top 25 contracted services in FY 2023-24, accounting for approximately $10 million in spending, include custodial services, breakfast and lunch service to feed children (not adults), IEP software, printing and copying, Driver’s Education, high-dosage tutoring, School Resource Officers* (*costs which are eventually reimbursed by Orange County as part of a formula where funds are obligated for the specific purpose of school safety), IEP services, visiting international faculty, security, progress monitoring tools and more.

Q: You’ve used the term “RIF” or “Reduction in Force”. Does RIF mean layoffs?

A: No. In our case, RIF is policy language that can also be used for a restructuring or reorganization. People are offered placement into other positions within CHCCS, and then the vacated positions are cut.

Q: Why would we start the school year in this manner?

A: We regret that we are at this juncture. The latest information and our resulting actions are tied to the end of the most recent fiscal year, which was June 30. While this demonstrates that the district is taking necessary action in a timely manner, we certainly wish we were starting the school year in a different way.