Dark Clouds For Bright Beginnings; CMS Budget Cuts $100 Million
Superintendent Peter Gorman on Tuesday afternoon rolled out recommended cuts of about $100 million for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools that include scuttling more than half of the district’s Bright Beginnings classes, eliminating more than 1,500 jobs, including hundreds of teachers and teachers assistants and school security staff, while increasing classroom sizes and lengthening the school day for thousands of students around the county.
Also included as part of Gorman’s recommended cuts: eliminating middle school athletics, trimming teacher signing and critical-needs bonuses, cutting custodial and building services staff, and eliminating unfilled career-technical education jobs.
Gorman said he would like school board approval for at least three of the recommendations as early as this month – tweaking the district’s so-called weighted student staffing formula, cutting Bright Beginnings, and changing bell schedules to lengthen school hours – and the board is expected to vote on them at its Jan. 25 meeting.
The board typically doesn’t tackle such weighty budget items until later in the year; the early decision on targeted recommendations, Gorman said, was necessary to help principals plan for staffing and scheduling and to allow parents to make more informed decisions about school enrollment.
While board members roundly lamented the recommended cuts, they offered no immediate pushback for averting any of them.
The district’s pre-K Bright Beginnings program, which has been praised for providing early educational development for at-risk students and criticized for lacking concrete data proving its merit, currently serves 3,200 students at 175 classes. That would be cut to 1,178 students at 70 classes, saving about $10.4 million, under Gorman’s recommendation. CMS would shutter existing pre-k sites and provide Bright Beginnings programming at select schools, including the new-next-year K-8 campuses.
CMS would still offer pre-k programming for 1,076 students through the More at Four initiative, Gorman said, along with 330 slots through the Head Start program and 150 available slots for exceptional children.
Anticipating possible cuts to Bright Beginnings, several supporters showed up at Tuesday’s school board meeting to defend the program.
Michael Rose, co-chair of the board of directors for the Larry King Center-Council for Children’s Rights, said research showed early-childhood development programs benefit students most at risk for failure at school. Failing to invest in that programming, he said, was penny-wise and pound-foolish because the district would spend more on special and remedial education for those children.
“Without Bright Beginnings,” Rose said, “more than 4,000 of our local children directly and indirectly served by this program will present at our school doors without the kinds of early experiences that teach them vocabulary, pre-literacy, math and social and emotional skills they need to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.”
Mary Groth, a teacher at the Amay James pre-K center, echoed that sentiment.
“The main reason the achievement gap exists is because students with educational needs start out behind,” she said, “and with very few exceptions stay behind.”
A good pre-k program, Groth said, addresses the causes and helps with solutions.
School Board member Joe White said he would likely support the recommended Bright Beginnings cuts, even though he thought the programming added educational value to the district.
“If I were king for the day, I would decree we have universal pre-K,” said White, but conceded that CMS could not afford to continue funding pre-K programming at the expense of its K-12 budget. White, along with other board members, encouraged district officials to partner with community groups to find ways to provide additional pre-k services, outside CMS.
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