This is an OP/ED from Jennifer De La Jara, a former Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member.
Any day now, the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance (CRBA) will announce its new president and CEO. As a former member of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education (BOE), I hope this ushers in a new era of supporting the business of traditional public schools.
This is not to say that CRBA has not supported education before. Certainly, they helped raise awareness of the historic $2.5 billion school bond initiative in November 2023. The CRBA then recognized that an investment of our county tax dollars in the students of our community was an investment in our future.
Now, business leaders must lead the same way when it comes to our state’s taxes. Given that 60% of any school district’s budget comes from appropriations made by the North Carolina General Assembly, and the fact that North Carolina is once again ranked 49th in public school investment in the country, leaders Business and policy makers should have serious concerns about the future of our state.
As education investment suffers, North Carolina was recently ranked by Cnbc Two-year run (2022-23) as the best state in which to do business. In 2024, Virginia reclaimed the top spot thanks in part to its top ranking in the Education subgroup. CNBC previously cited this lack of investment in education, as well as negative political discourse, as areas of concern for our state.
Let us be clear that when we discuss school funding, we are largely referring to educator compensation, recognizing that our schools need financial resources to hire human resources to teach our children reading, writing and critical thinking. Any local school board budget is typically 80-85% including salaries and benefits.
The state health plan is managed by the state treasurer and salaries are primarily set by the General Assembly, which of course has been run by the GOP for 14 years.
For reference, a first-year teacher in Charlotte earns about $48,000 per year, with about $7,000 of that total provided by Mecklenburg County. While we are fortunate to live in a county with a thriving local tax base to supplement education, let’s also keep in mind that it is three times more expensive to live here than in rural areas of our state.
That’s why, in the fall, the CMS BOE directly urged GOP leadership to increase teacher pay when it returned to session in September. For years, the BOE has advocated for increased teacher pay and a reinstatement of the longevity and master’s salary categories, both of which were eliminated about 10 years ago by the General Assembly.
The result of ignoring these calls to action has been a sharp decline in college preparatory programs, coupled with a mass exodus of veteran educators.
In October 2023, I attended the CRBA Fall Retreat in Greenville, South Carolina with community leaders from the public and private sectors. We were placed in groups of four to find solutions for our community’s greatest needs: transportation, housing, access to health care and, of course, education.
As a BOE member at the time, I mentioned how our teachers cannot afford to live in the communities where they work. One group later suggested that a solution to subsidizing teacher pay can be found in a charitable gift from the Gates Foundation.
Unfortunately, philanthropy is not going to solve this problem. I later explained to several business leaders that CMS has 20,000 employees. If everyone receives a single $5,000 bonus, the one-time cost would be $100 million. The quick math example initially surprised many of them.
Quite simply, we will not philanthropize our way out of this challenge and we can no longer seek to put band-aids on gaping wounds. The only way to solve it is to provide long-term sustainable wage increases provided by the scalability of state government, which happens to be the exact entity responsible for supporting it. Nobody else.
We will overcome this challenge by collectively demanding that our tax dollars support educator compensation. Political will is what is missing from this equation.
We are a wealthy state with millions in unspent tax dollars. Some call it a surplus, but you can’t have a real surplus when the Leandro case says our schools have been underfunded for 30 years.
What we have is the need to end the chronic underallocation of school funding and a surge of political will to make the investments needed to change our trajectory.
Best practices in community equity initiatives have long taught us to listen to the community closest to the situation for solutions to solve the problem. This is what CMS Boe has done by regularly stating and reinforcing that their greatest need is to support teacher pay.
Unfortunately, the CRBA did not adopt the board’s call to action on its legislative priorities in the fall and General Assembly leadership returned to session to funnel even more taxpayer dollars to upper-class families using private school vouchers — a move that other prominent leaders in our state have recently called for.
Additionally, former Bank of America NC Chairman Charles Bowman closed a November 2023 business summit by calling on business leaders to engage in education issues, which is why I’m calling now our new head of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, which may be, to focus on the economic development issue of public education.
CRBA has a new opportunity to support our schools, our educators, our children – and therefore, of course, our very future.
De La Jara works for Goodwill Industries in Charlotte. She holds a bachelor’s degree from UNC Chapel Hill and a master’s degree from UNC Charlotte. She was on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board from 2019-23.