NC Senate passes bill to fund private-school-voucher backlog, but no new teacher raises
After months of stagnation, the N.C. General Assembly’s Republican supermajority came to a deal on two of its key issues of 2024: funding the private-school-voucher backlog and requiring sheriffs to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Democrats, who are in the minority in both the Senate and the House, objected to being kept in the dark until days before votes on the legislation. State lawmakers returned to Raleigh this week to vote on the Republicans’ bill, a deal they announced late last week.
The Senate passed the bill 27-17.
What’s in the bill
After the Senate’s vote Monday, the House plans to vote Wednesday.
House Bill 10 was originally just about requiring sheriffs to comply with detainer requests from ICE to hold someone who has been arrested and is believed to be in the country illegally, for up to 48 hours, to give ICE agents time to come and take custody.
The new version, described by Republicans as a “mini budget bill,” also funds the vouchers backlog and allocates money for Medicaid rebase (increased Medicaid costs), broadband internet expansion and meeting K-12 enrollment and community colleges growth.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is expected to veto the bill given his opposition to the expanded voucher funding. If he does, then the House and Senate would have to take additional votes to override his veto.
If it becomes law, the bill would provide an additional $463 million in voucher funding to clear the 55,000-student backlog of families waiting for an Opportunity Scholarship now that the income limits have been removed. Depending on their income, families would get between $3,360 and $7,468 per child to cover private-school costs.
“The emphasis that we have placed on Opportunity Scholarships is in giving parents more of a say in their child’s education,” Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, told reporters after the vote.
“And every bill that we’ve had that addresses those kinds of issues that Democrats have been opposed to, whether it was the Parents’ Bill of Rights, whether it’s the Opportunity Scholarships, they seem to be more inclined to be supportive of bureaucracies, as opposed to parents and students,” Berger said.
What isn’t in the mini budget bill, however, are any additional raises for teachers and school personnel.
That’s what House Republicans wanted to fund along with the voucher backlog, which was created when lawmakers opened the floodgates for anyone to receive the taxpayer-funded, private-school Opportunity Scholarships.
Republican House Speaker Tim Moore said earlier this year that he wanted additional public education funding that included raises if the voucher funding is passed.
Most state employees received 3% raises for the current fiscal year, which began in July. Teachers are not state employees, but their base salaries are set by the legislature.
Teacher raises authorized earlier this year included an increased starting salary of $41,000 and step increases that are built into teacher pay as they become more experienced, topping out at 25 years. However there is a salary plateau with no increases for 15 through 24 years of experience. For a veteran teacher of 25 or more years, last year’s base pay was $5,510 a month, or $55,100 a year, and this year it is $5,595, or $55,950 a year.
Public school teachers ‘disheartened’
Public school educators called the voucher expansion a mistake during a roundtable Monday organized by Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, a Raleigh Democrat. They pointed to problems such as schools having ailing HVAC systems, class sizes of more than 30 students and not having enough teachers and bus drivers.
“If we had a fully funded public education system, we could consider providing extra for families who are able to make the choice to send their children to private schools,” said Keegan Storrs, a teacher at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in Durham.
“But until our public schools are fully funded, we have no business talking about vouchers.”
Storrs said extra voucher funding would have been better served helping teachers like him who are working multiple jobs. When his salary is adjusted for inflation, Storrs said he’s only making $2,000 more than he did in 2016.
“Teachers are enraged right now by what’s happening in Raleigh and really around the country,” Storrs said. “This is a national trend that we’re seeing.“
“When we pour our entire hearts into children and into our jobs and we are met with lower wages than we received the year before it’s disrespectful, and it’s undermining the entire mission of our public education system,” he said.
It’s disheartening that GOP lawmakers didn’t at least provide the additional raises they talked about including this year, said Eugenia Floyd, a fourth-grade teacher at Mary Scroggs Elementary School in Chapel Hill.
“I know teachers that again, are living paycheck to paycheck,” Floyd said. “That is a real reality. I have friends who have taken out loans for child care. That is a reality.”
During the Senate floor debate, Democrats said the vouchers funding will hurt public schools.
Sen. Michael Garrett, a Guilford County Democrat, noted that more private schools are in metro areas like Wake and Mecklenburg counties represented by Democrats, not Republicans.
Sen. Gladys Robinson, also a Guilford County Democrat, said the bill should have included more money for child-care centers and and other early-childhood-education priorities.
Berger told reporters Monday that the goal of the deal was to include things like Opportunity Scholarship funding already adopted by the House and Senate. Additional teacher raises was only a House priority this year.
“We’ll have conversations down the road, but that’s something that had not passed both [chambers] and so was not something that was subject to consideration,” Berger said.
Another Senate Republican priority this most recent session was legalizing medical marijuana, but some House Republicans disagreed and Berger said that didn’t even come up in the negotiations.
