The North Carolina State Board of Education Thursday approved its annual list of funding request priorities ahead of the General Assembly’s short session in April.
This year’s list features more than $1 billion in asks — many of which were on last year’s list too, but never passed the finish line in the General Assembly.
Some general priorities for the board don’t have specific price tags. Those include a moratorium on the Opportunity Scholarship program that would offer no new awards to students beginning next school year and reappropriate those funds to public schools.
The board is also requesting the state invest in raising pay for all public school employees while making teacher salaries the highest in the Southeast. Geoff Coltrane of the Department of Public Instruction said North Carolina is currently ranked 8th of 12 Southeastern states — and 10th when adjusting for cost of living.
“We’ve clearly fallen behind, and fallen behind some of our closest neighbors,” Coltrane said. “South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama all now have average teacher pay that’s higher than us.”
There was some traction for educator raises last year — Gov. Josh Stein, the House and the Senate all proposed some form of raise for teachers in their respective budget proposals before negotiations stalled. North Carolina still doesn’t have a budget for the current fiscal year, and teachers have only gotten salary step increases based on 2025-26 salaries.
There are about a dozen items that would cost a total of $478 million in both recurring and non-recurring costs that the board is prioritizing to get funded during this year’s short session. Those include literacy initiatives like expanding the diagnostic literacy exam DIBELS, currently taken by kids in grades K-3 to grades 4 and 5.
Another roughly $40 million proposal would expand science of reading professional development support to teachers in grades 6-8. The state previously invested $114 million in rolling out that training to grades K-5.
Those two items were included in both the House and Senate budget proposals, so there could be traction to get those accomplished.
Another proposal to overhaul how funding is allocated to schools for exceptional children services would cost an estimated $109 million in non-recurring funds, followed by $89.4 million in recurring funds. The so-called weighted funding formula would allocate more funds for students who have greater need.
The board set separate “ongoing” priorities that are not necessarily at the top of the list for this year’s short session, but remain priorities. That includes a much-debated request for $150 million that would go toward replacing aging devices for all K-12 students to maintain one-to-one devices.
Coltrane had suggested the board consider funding devices only for grades 3-12 or 6-12, arguing those proposals may be more palatable to lawmakers.
“There has been some pushback legislatively on, do we need to be refreshing all devices for all students, or is there some expectation from local districts?” Coltrane said. “Or maybe that we don’t have one-to-one devices for all students.”
Board member Olivia Oxendine expressed concern about the overexposure of technology to younger students, but the board ultimately moved forward with the full proposal, with board member Jill Camnitz arguing the board could always pare it back later.
The priorities passed in an 8-2 vote, with Oxendine and state Treasurer Brad Briner, who is a voting member of the board, voting against them.
While the board votes on its priority funding requests, the General Assembly will have the final say.
