Vilma Leake: CMS Tooth Fairy
When the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education two weeks ago pushed back a vote to cut $10.4 million from Bright Beginnings, board member Trent Merchant urged his colleagues to find a way to salvage the popular pre-kindergarten program by embracing the innovative work ethic of Walt Disney and letting their consciences, in the mode of Jiminy Cricket, be their guides.
On Tuesday night, when a vote on Bright Beginnings was again delayed, school board members had turned their hopes to the tooth fairy – specifically, Mecklenburg Commissioner Vilma Leake, who last week pitched a proposal to award Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools a $10 million grant, earmarked for Bright Beginnings, outside the school district’s annual funding allotment from the county.
“I hope that she becomes the tooth fairy and finds that money for us so we can run the program, and I will do everything I can to help her,” school board member Joe White said Tuesday night.
White, however, said he would likely only be able to support county funding for Bright Beginnings if it were in addition to the school district’s regular allotment. Call it the tooth fairy caveat.
CMS currently spends about $21 million a year on Bright Beginnings and Superintendent Peter Gorman had asked the school board for an early decision on his recommendation to cut $10.4 million from the program, shrinking it from 175 classes that serve 3,200 four-year-old students to 70 classes and 1,178 kids.
Delaying a vote on the recommended cut, Gorman backtracked Tuesday, would provide time for school staff to work with community leaders helping to find alternate solutions for pre-K programming. Some of those options are already being discussed, said CMS Chief Academic Officer Ann Clark, and include scaling back Bright Beginnings to a half-day program, offering it only three or four days a week, or trimming a month from its calendar year.
While those options are being pondered, however, the school board’s vote this week to delay a decision on Bright Beginnings until it considers its full budget in the spring effectively volleyed the task of finding a funding solution for the program back into the lap of the board of commissioners, which is slated to vote in April on the $10-million tooth fairy grant.
That gives Bright Beginnings advocates ample time to turbo-charge their lobbying efforts, which have already been kicked into overdrive. They were at it again Tuesday night, touting a recent poll that they said showed more than three-quarters of Mecklenburg voters support a county tax hike to support CMS.
The poll was commissioned by Child Care Resources and the Council for Children’s Right, two groups that have lobbied hard to prevent any cuts to Bright Beginnings.
Conducted by Public Policy Polling, the poll showed that 50 percent of 1,007 registered Mecklenburg voters surveyed indicated they would support paying up to $100 in additional property taxes to support CMS; 19 percent said they would be willing to fork over an extra $100 to $250, while 5 percent said they’d pay an additional $250 to $500. Twenty-two percent of respondents indicated they would not be willing to pay any additional property tax.
Those results, while questioned by some as potentially misleading, thrilled advocates for early education who had commissioned the poll.
“I think that’s a plus that we should all celebrate,” Brett Loftis, executive director of the Council of Children’s Rights, told school board members. “We should celebrate that and use it as we go forward with our conversations with the county commission about what we need in this community to raise healthy kids.”
Loftis, though, wasn’t the only one advocating for a push to convince commissioners to find additional money for Bright Beginnings. School Board chairman Eric Davis also gave a tacit nod of encouragement for advocates to pressure commissioners to come off the hip with more loot.
“The question in front of our community tonight and over the next three or four months is how much do we value our school system,” Davis said. “We need your voices to spread to our partners who decide the other part of the equation. They need to hear from you.”
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