RALEIGH (March 26, 2024) – It’s a very good first step in the state’s budget process.
Gov. Josh Stein’s recommended budget for 2025-27 makes numerous proposals that are good for public education.
How the General Assembly responds will be crucial to what this state wants to be: Does it want to be the education state on which it built its reputation, supplying the workforce that 21st century employers demand?
Or will it revert to the segregated South of the early 1950s, before Brown v. Board of Education?
Stein proposes to spend an additional $876 million on public education in 2025-26 and $1.2 billion in 2026-27. Though Republicans have a veto-proof majority in the state Senate, they are one vote short of that in the House, giving Stein, a Democrat, slightly more negotiating leverage than his predecessor, Roy Cooper.
Among the highlights in the governor’s recommendations:
•Teacher pay: Stein would increase average teacher pay in North Carolina by 10.6% over two years. More than 10,000 teachers left North Carolina classrooms in 2023, the most in at least two decades.1 He would raise starting teacher pay to $53,000, the highest in the Southeast, where it currently ranks among the lowest.
“It is an embarrassment, and does not need to be,” he said in Fayetteville last week.2 Stein also proposes to restore an additional 10% pay bump for teachers with master’s degrees in the subjects they teach.
There could be room for agreement. Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall have both indicated some degree of support for raises for teachers and other state employees.
And a bipartisan group of House members has already filed legislation to spend $1.6 billion to raise teacher pay by $9,000 to $12,000 – an average of 22% – depending on experience.
Under the House bill, starting pay would climb from $41,000 to $50,000, and pay for teachers with at least 25 years of experience would rise to $68,230. The bill would also restore master’s degree pay supplements.3
•A $300 stipend for teachers to buy school supplies, at a cost of $30 million a year. Teachers currently spend an average of $600 of their own money on supplies for their classrooms.4
•Free school breakfast for all students, at a cost of $85 million a year.
•$5 million for a study of how best to regulate students’ use of cell phones in school.
•$63 million for school safety equipment that would include cameras and metal detectors.
•$15 million to extend the research-based “science of reading” instruction into the state’s middle schools.
•A moratorium on taxpayer-funded vouchers for parents to send their children to private schools, which legislators have expanded by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two years after they removed any income limits for vouchers.
“Public dollars should go to public schools,” Stein said last week. “We’re a fast-growing state. We have increasing student enrollment. We have to meet the needs of our public-school students.”
House Speaker Hall, however, has already called the proposal a “non-starter.”5
•$4 billion in bonds for school construction and a backlog of repair and renovation needs in schools across the state. The bonds would provide an average of $35 million for each school district.6
“Too many of our schools are overcrowded or use trailers or have old, leaking roofs and broken heating and air conditioning,” Stein told legislators in his State of the State address this month. “It’s 2025 – we shouldn’t have to send kids home from school because the heat doesn’t work.”
But Republican legislators prefer a pay-as-you-go approach to capital projects and have declared Stein’s proposal dead on arrival at the legislature.
•A pause on tax cuts: A bipartisan team of economists predict an $800 million revenue shortfall for the state in 2026-27 due to planned tax cuts approved by the Republican legislature. Stein has urged legislators to pause – not repeal – the tax reductions.7
“We won’t be able to make these necessary investments if we do not address the self-inflicted fiscal cliff we face in a couple of years, especially given today’s uncertainties,” he said in the State of the State address.8
Republican legislative leaders have simply dismissed both the revenue projections and Stein’s calls to freeze the tax cuts.
So there appears to be room for negotiation between the Democratic governor and the Republican legislature on some items – but not others.
Let’s hope they do what’s best for North Carolina’s children.