Change Agent That Wasn’t
Remember way back when Peter Gorman was hailed as an agent of change after being hired to helm Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, and even conservative naysayers like Commissioner Bill James expressed some degree of confidence in the new chief’s promises to break up the district’s bloated bureaucracy and right-size its fiscal ship.
The cheers of optimism lasted all of a few months, until Gorman started his shell game of decentralization and its accompanying learning community outposts that actually grew bureaucracy, adding layers of six-figure salaries onto the CMS payroll and piling up millions of dollars in capital expense.
But that was mere peanuts compared to the long-term damage Gorman will have ultimately contributed by allowing himself to be co-opted in 2007 and used as the beefcake poster boy to champion the insanely expensive and misprioritized school bond campaign. Recall that Gorman had originally backed using 80 percent of bond revenue to build new schools in the grossly overcrowded suburbs and 20 percent for urban school renovations, before he abandoned his principles for a place at the uptown lunch bunch table. A little pressure from radically liberal school board members, county commissioners and uptown powerbrokers bent on getting their slice of the bond pie at any cost, and – poof! – Gorman flipped his support for something closer to a 60/40 suburban/urban mix, which in turn bumped myriad misprioritized capital projects up the school building list.
It was well documented, even then, that CMS was rotten with under-capacity and under-utilized schools. Yet instead of aggressively pursuing a plan to consolidate those facilities, and potentially save the county tens and millions of dollars, Gorman took up the Taj Mahal building mantra and pushed a plan of $500 million capital outlay for CMS every two years.
CMS capital spending under Gorman’s leadership, in fact, has contributed disproportionately to the county’s debt dilemma and budget crisis. So it’s incredibly disingenuous to hear Gorman now lament the prospect in coming years of having to close schools – potentially in numbers to reach double digits – because of the financial woe the district faces and which he had a direct role in helping to trigger.
A majority of the school board, with Gorman as ringleader, took facility consolidation off the table in this year’s budget process as a way to save money, opting instead to roll down the path of wholesale teacher layoffs and cuts on the classroom level. Gorman claimed there wasn’t enough time to plan for school closings to help this year’s budget crash.
If Gorman had been paying attention to the likes of former school board member Larry Gauvreau and current member Kaye McGarry, who for years have lambasted Gorman for not proactively planning to close under-capacity schools as a cost-saving measure and practical necessity, CMS would find itself in a much better position to manage its fiscal crisis and maybe could have helped the county avoid one altogether.
If teachers – or librarians or park employees or social workers, for that matter – want to know why their jobs are on the chopping block during this year, they need look no further than the mismanagement of Gorman and county leaders who placed political priorities over fiscal realties and ran up an irresponsible school building bill for which we’re all paying the price.
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