George Dunlap Spews Utter Nonsense
When Commissioner Bill James, a white Republican, tried to cut $200,000 from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ budget and give it to the Veterans Service Office as part of last week’s straw votes, Commissioner George Dunlap, a black Democrat, went off the deep end, exploding with a race-baiting diatribe laced with egregious distortions and flat-out nonsense.
“I was really trying not to speak to this, but I want to provide a little history,” Dunlap said. “If you do the research, what you find is that when major metropolitan cities become increasingly Afro-American in terms of their school population, funding for them dries up.”
Funding, obviously, like the $6 million that county commissioners had just added to CMS’ budget during their straw votes.
“School systems are not funded at the same levels they were when the population of those students were majority students,” Dunlap ranted. “And it bothers me to think that every time we have a discussion about budget, CMS seems to be the first place that people attack, which suggests to me that we want Charlotte-Mecklenburg to trend the same way as some of these other major metropolitan cities who no longer fund education because the school population has increasingly become minority. I’m offended that’s the first place we look to take money.”
Unlike, say, the Veterans Service Office, which is targeted to lose nearly 50 percent of its annual county funding, or parks and recreation, 37 percent, or the libraries, 45 percent, while CMS will lose about 6 percent.
Dunlap proceeded with his revisionist history lesson, explaining that since the days of former Superintendent Eric Smith, when CMS flipped to a minority-majority school district where minorities outnumbered white students, “ever since that time, every year we hear the same comment: let’s not fund CMS.”
That’s an amazingly boldface distortion by any standard, even the new lows Dunlap seems to set for himself every time he opens his mouth.
Over the last decade, there have been only two years – two – when CMS has not received an increase in county funding for operating expenses. During that same decade, the district’s annual county funding has ballooned from $207.5 million to $317.4 million, hitting a high of $351.4 million during fiscal year 2008-09, before seeing its funding cut $34 million to its current-year level.
And that’s just for operating expenses, not including the billions of dollars dumped into CMS’ capital plan that in large part has fueled the massive debt crisis the county currently faces.
Here’s an actual breakdown of CMS’ bounty during recent years that Dunlap contends we’ve heard the same mantra: “let’s not fund CMS.” The amounts represent changes in county funding over the previous years’ operating budget allocated for CMS, not including state and federal funding:
1999-2000: + $21-million
2000-01: + $20.9-million
2001-02: + $37.5-million
2002-03: – ($877,352)
2003-04: flat funding
2004-05: + $11,049
2005-06: + $26.4-million
2006-07: + $24.7-million
2007-08: + $25.2-million
2008-09: + $10-million
Obviously, as Dunlap says, we “no longer fund education because the schools’ population has become increasingly minority.”
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