School Board Wants To Stash $25M
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education this week backed a recommendation from Superintendent Peter Gorman to bank $25 million in new federal funding that’s headed the district’s way, instead of spending it immediately to rehire teachers that lost their jobs because of budget cuts earlier this year.
CMS pink-slipped about 400 teachers, but a recent influx of state cash allowed the district to restore 141 of those positions. Some school board members have pushed to use the newly minted $25 million in federal money to fill any vacant teaching positions for the current school year.
But a majority of the board bought into Gorman’s logic that the money would be needed even more next year, as CMS is set to tumble off a self-described $50-million “funding cliff,” when the district’s federal stimulus-money well is scheduled to run dry.
Gorman’s reasoning is sound, but the notion that CMS will be able to hang onto a bulk of the stashed $25 million to help salvage next year’s budget is likely a pipedream.
Remember that the board of commissioners’ Democrat majority created millions of dollars in magic-bean money to balloon this year’s budget, simply by increasing the amount of sales tax revenue projected to be collected – despite warnings from the county manager that doing so could have dire consequences.
If the Democrats’ inflated revenue projections fall short, a distinct possibility given ongoing economic trends, the county could be facing massive mid-year budget cuts for the current fiscal year.
In other words, don’t count on CMS being able to save its new federal money to buoy a sinking ship on the rocky banks of a funding cliff next year; it’s an odds-on-favorite bet that Gorman & Co. will have to blow through much of it to deal with a funding chasm that could swallow them whole later this year.
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