Remember way back when Peter Gorman was hailed as an agent of change after being hired to helm Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, and even conservative naysayers like Commissioner Bill James expressed some degree of confidence in the new chief’s promises to break up the district’s bloated bureaucracy and right-size its fiscal ship. The cheers of optimism lasted […]
Teacher assistants, actually, about 164 of them, set to be fired under the budget recommendation the schools chief rolled out last night. That’s on top of up to 600 teachers and 250 other staff previously targeted for layoffs in Gorman’s proposed budget. Grand total: 1,030 jobs, along with eliminating magnet school bus stops, sidelining middle […]
Some called it “educational apartheid,” others “a return to segregation,” and regardless of the catch phrase they used, none were happy with Superintendent Peter Gorman’s initiative that will lump all of the district’s Title I schools into a newly created Central Zone learning community. Title I is educrat code for high-poverty, low-performing schools, the majority […]
The budget that Superintendent Peter Gorman says he will present to county commissioners will include a request for an additional $16 million over and above the $317 million in county dollars Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools received this year, while simultaneously including options for cutting $80 million in state and local money. Gorman, who last year received a […]
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education moved a step closer Tuesday night to the grim reality of having to layoff upwards of 800 employees, including about 600 teachers, in response to a funding shortfall that could require the district to cut $80 million from its budget. With a 6-3 vote, the board rejected a motion to […]
Eliminating middle school athletics has become a nearly perennial threat used by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to help rally support for more local funding come budget season. Usually it works and somehow a last-minute, Hail Mary pass comes through to save sports, along with band, arts, and music programs. But this year, with CMS facing upwards of […]
As we predicted, there’s movement afoot at CMS to tweak and/or consolidate at least some of the school system’s district offices that currently anchor so-called learning communities scattered across the county. Confirmation of such came about by pure happenstance: I recently found myself sitting beside a top-ranking member of CMS’ executive staff and overheard him […]
The Board of Education learned Tuesday afternoon that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools would need to fork over $6.3 million from its current-year budget to help close an estimated $20-million shortfall in the county’s current-year budget. And that was the good news, compared to what followed: Board members were told that County Manager Harry Jones would be pitching […]
There’s been ambiguous talk popping up in media reports concerning possible moves by CMS to do something with its learning community outposts, those pricey offices scattered around the district that debuted as CMS’ answer to decentralization. By most counts the district offices have been a flop, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and doing […]
Faced with a bruising debt crisis that is bringing new borrowing to fund capital projects to all but a screeching halt, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education this week started a process of prioritizing school construction plans. Or maybe that should be re-prioritizing. When voters approved a record-high $516-million school bond in 2007, the board of […]
