This is an op/ed by 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 business community support of traditional public schools.
That’s not to say that the CRBA hasn’t supported education before. Certainly, they were instrumental in helping raise awareness about the historic $2.5-billion school bond initiative in November 2023. The CRBA recognized then that an investment from our county tax dollars in our community’s students was an investment in our future.
Now, business leaders need to lead similarly regarding our state’s tax dollars. Considering 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 again ranked 49th in public school investment in the nation, business leaders and policymakers alike should have grave concerns about the future of our state.
While education investment suffers, North Carolina was recently ranked by CNBC for two years running (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 had previously cited that lack of investment in education, along with negative political discourse, as areas of concern for our state.
Let’s be clear that when we are discussing school funding, we are largely referring to raising educator pay, recognizing that our schools need financial resources to hire human resources to teach our children reading, writing and critical thinking skills. Any local school board’s budget is generally 80-85% comprising salaries and benefits.
The state healthcare plan is managed by the state treasurer and salaries are primarily set by the General Assembly, which of course has been led by the GOP for the past 14 years.
For reference, a first-year teacher in Charlotte makes about $48,000 a 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’s three times more expensive to live here than in rural parts of our state.
That’s why, in the fall, the CMS BOE directly urged GOP leadership to raise teacher pay when they returned to session in September. For years, the BOE has been advocating for increased teacher pay and reinstatement of longevity and master’s degree pay categories, both of which were eliminated about 10 years ago by the General Assembly.
The result of ignoring these calls for action has been a steep decline in university education preparatory programs, coupled with a massive 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 come up with solutions for our community’s greatest needs: transportation, housing, access to healthcare and, of course, education.
As an at-large BOE member at the time, I mentioned how our teachers can’t afford to live in the communities where they work. One group later suggested a solution to subsidize teacher pay may be found in a charitable gift by the Gates Foundation.
Unfortunately, philanthropy is not going to solve this issue. I later explained to several business leaders that CMS has 20,000 employees. If each receives a single $5,000 bonus, the one-time cost would be $100 million dollars. 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 look to put Band-Aids on gaping wounds. The only way to solve it is by providing long-term, sustainable wage increases provided by the scalability of the state government, which just so happens to be the exact entity charged with supporting it. No one else.
We overcome this challenge by collectively demanding that our taxpayer dollars support educator pay. Political will is what is missing from this equation.
We are a wealthy state with millions of unspent tax dollars. Some call that a surplus, but you can’t have an actual surplus when the Leandro case states that our schools have been underfunded for 30 years.
What we have is a need to end the chronic under-allocation of funding for schools and a surge of political will to make the necessary investments to change our trajectory.
Best practices in community-based equity initiatives have long taught us to listen to the community closest to the situation for solutions to tackle the problem. That is what the CMS BOE has done by consistently stating and reinforcing that their greatest need is supporting 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 out.
Additionally, former Bank of America NC President Charles Bowman closed out a business summit in November 2023 by calling for business leaders to engage in education issues, which is why I now call on our incoming Charlotte Regional Business Alliance leader, whomever that may be, to focus on the economic development issue that is public education.
The CRBA has a fresh 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 has 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. This commentary previous appeared in the QC Nerve.