The North Carolina House began releasing portions of its state budget proposal this week.
Proposals for teacher pay often take the spotlight in education budgets, but Republican leaders have yet to announce their plans for teacher and state employee salaries. They're expected to unveil those Monday. Meanwhile, the House education appropriations committee met Thursday to review other education items.
The House's budget boosts funding to extend the state's "science of reading" initiatives into middle school and to cover services for more students with disabilities and English language learners in public schools. It also includes some major cuts to staffing at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.
Budget proposals are based on changes to the prior fiscal year's base budget. Among all the changes, the following are some of the notable additions and reductions to state funding for K-12 education in the House's proposal.
Additions:
- $10 million in funding for middle schools to implement "science of reading" training for teachers and principals, plus $1.4 million to provide diagnostic reading assessments to students through the fifth grade. Currently an assessment called DIBELS is used in kindergarten through third grade.
An additional $10.6 million to raise the state's cap on funding for students with disabilities. Currently, school districts only receive special education funds for up to 13% of their students. But most school districts have more students with diagnosed disabilities than the state funding covers.
Many charter schools and about 80 school districts, or more than two-thirds, currently exceed the cap. This proposal would raise the cap to 13.25%. According to legislative staff, that would be likely to fully cover 5 more school districts. But in some school districts, as many as 22% of students need services.
Democratic representatives Zack Hawkins and Monika Johnson-Hostler questioned whether the cap could be raised even higher. Republican Representative Hugh Blackwell responded that this proposal is an effort to "inch up the cap" and perhaps weigh funding more towards students who need the most expensive services, following a proposal from the state education officials. He noted that the Senate's budget does not increase the cap at all.
- $10.7 million in additional state funding for students with limited English proficiency. This provision would also change the funding formula for those students to a simplified per-student basis. Currently, schools receive funding when at least 2.5% of their students qualify, with funding for up to 10.6% of the school district's population. This would eliminate that formula in favor of funding per head count of students who qualify.
- $500,000 for DPI to conduct a study at Wake County Public Schools on solutions to the district's HVAC and cooling issues, with a requirement that the findings be publicly posted and shared with other school districts.
Reductions:
- Eliminate four director-level positions at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and make a $1.8 million reduction to DPI to eliminate vacant positions. The Senate made a similar proposal. Only one of the director positions that would be eliminated is currently filled, the Director of School Athletics.
- Eliminate $2.2 million in funds DPI used to train new school finance officers by partnering them with an experienced mentor.
- Eliminate funding for Plasma Games technology, a science-based application that has received repeated critical reports from schools that it is unnecessary or underutilized. State lawmakers have allotted more than $7 million total to the company over the last several state budgets.
- Eliminate $1 million in funding for virtual cooperative innovative high schools; a coding and mobile application grant program; and recurring funding for a nonprofit that supports children who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Other policy changes:
Lawmakers sometimes include other policy changes in their budget negotiations that may not require or include funding. This year they would:
- Require school boards to adopt a cell-phone free policy to restrict phone use during class time, adopt a social media policy, and provide instruction to students on the safe use of social media. These policy proposals originated in bills from this session.
- Provide class size flexibility to school districts with rapidly growing populations. The provision allows districts designated as "fast-growing" to have an additional three students above the class size ratios that are established for kindergarten through third grade.
- Require DPI to train Pre-K teachers to identify signs of dyslexia and implement a dyslexia screening for all NC-Pre-K students.
- Bar schools from providing an alternate school lunch to students who have debt for school meals and require that they receive the standard school meal.
The Senate released its budget plan last month, and once the House releases all of its budget, the two will begin negotiations on a final state budget bill to send to Governor Stein.
