Rope-a-Dope School Board Budget Hearing
From teachers and their assistants to students and their parents, people lined up Tuesday night to blast the Board of Education and Superintendent Peter Gorman over proposed budget cuts that could lead to what many speakers called unacceptable and disastrous consequences in classrooms next year.
Faced with a potential budget shortfall that could top $75 million, with a $21 million cut in county funding part of the total, several speakers asked board members to aggressively lobby the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners for more local funding, even if it meant hiking taxes, rather than moving forward with cuts to the classroom.
“We urge you to encourage the commissioners to be bold and brave enough to consider increasing tax revenue if that is the only way to help our students,” said Mary McCray, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators.
Gorman’s recommended budget actually requests $16-million in new county funding, but few expect commissioners, wrestling with their own multi-million-dollar budget woes, to deliver. Several commissioners, including Chairman Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, have said they would avoid proposing a property tax increase this year.
In that light, Gorman’s budget recommendation includes a worst-case scenario that closes the budget chasm by carving out cuts to include about 600 teaching positions and 164 teacher assistant positions, with total layoffs topping 1,000.
That prospect didn’t sit well with teachers who helped fill the government center’s meeting chamber to capacity for Tuesday night’s public hearing on the budget. Nearly 60 people signed up to speak, with the barrage of critical comments lasting more than two hours.
School board members, for the most part, sat impassively silent as the crowd delivered its body blows to the proposed budget.
John Mock, a high school science teacher, said he agreed with a previous speaker that school board members didn’t get paid enough, but said he wasn’t sure the same applied to Gorman. At one point, Mock asked if the superintendent, whose annual pay package tops $300,000, had a monitor at the dais similar to school board members.
“I ask,” Mock said with a scathing sarcasm, “because he’s been shuffling papers for the last year.”
“There’s not a single board member, there’s not a single superintendent, a single district superintendent, that has educated a single child today. Who has?” Mock asked, and turned to point to the crowd of teachers in attendance. “They have. If you don’t support the teachers, there’s no reason for your existence.”
When school board chairman Eric Davis cut Mock off mid-sentence because his allotted speaking time had expired, the science teacher offered a parting shot.
“That’s three minutes? Whoa. We have to do more with less, I guess,” Mock said, echoing a phrase that Gorman has used frequently to describe the budget cuts.
Gariann Yochym, ninth-grade English inclusion teacher at East Meck High, passionately urged the board to reconsider proposed cuts that would increase class sizes and decrease resources in classrooms.
“If the projected teacher and support staff cuts become a reality, our schools will be decimated,” said Yochym, who delivered a none-too-subtle warning to school board members.
“You were democratically elected to serve. I was hired to serve the public,” she said. “You can be replaced; we cannot. You have the power of your vote and we have the power of ours.”
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