School Board Approves Pink Slip Budget
A fractious Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education on Tuesday night voted 6-3 to approve a schools budget that includes plans to slash upwards of 600 teacher and teacher assistant positions, implement a pay-to-play scheme for middle- and high school sports, increase class sizes while shrinking transportation options to popular magnet schools, and have students pay fees to take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams.
The approved budget, which gained support from board chairman Eric Davis and members Joe White, Trent Merchant, Tom Tate, Rhonda Lennon and Tim Morgan, tops $1-billion and requests an additional $15.5 million from the county while prepping for an anticipated cut of nearly $21 million, along with likely cuts from the state that could combine to carve out at least $78 million from CMS coffers.
Board members Kaye McGarry, Richard McElrath and Joyce Waddell voted against the budget. In doing so, they apparently violated some sort of double-secret blood oath board members took during a retreat earlier this year. That’s when, according to McElrath, it was decided board members should set aside any public opposition to contentious issues and vote unanimously to present a united front.
“If you feel like you’re going to lose a vote, just change your vote so we get a unanimous vote, because it looks better,” McElrath recapped Tuesday night, and then proceeded to vote his conscious rather than pretense.
“I believe deep in my heart and soul that this is not public education the way it should be,” McElrath said of what the approved budget accomplishes.
McElrath, along with Waddell, was specifically alarmed by an administrative reorganization plan that saves about $3.6 million by shrinking the district’s so-called learning communities from seven to five, while creating a Central Zone that will include all Title I schools. Critics contend the plan will unfairly stigmatize the schools and deny them access to resources available at other schools.
“They’re going to be identified as children from the Central Zone,” McElrath said. “The Central Zone is going to be poor, minority, low-performing – I don’t know what positives you can say about that.”
White tried, arguing that the Title I schools won’t be physically lumped together and that the district’s student assignment policy, not an administrative shuffle, is what creates concentrations of high-poverty at certain schools. The creation of the new Central Zone won’t change student assignment, White said, but would provide a way to more efficiently deliver resources to high-poverty schools under a central administrative umbrella.
“There is no relationship to what other children a child goes to school with, or associates all day long with in his or her school, to the learning community,” White said. “The learning community is about delivering services. It has no impact on student assignment. It’s totally unrelated.”
A motion to eliminate the Central Zone and equally disperse its schools under the administration of the remaining learning communities failed, gaining support only from McElrath, Waddell and McGarry.
A motion from McGarry was similarly shot down to eliminate all the learning communities – essentially outpost administrative offices – and use the savings to salvage teacher positions, with only McElrath and Waddell supporting the proposal.
“If I have to choose between administration and classroom teachers, hands down it would be classroom teachers,” McGarry said.
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