In a pair of meetings Thursday, education leaders at the state Department of Public Instruction and in the state House were in bipartisan agreement on waiving testing requirements and deadlines for the current school year. But tensions sparked over who's in charge of education relief funds.
All told thus far, the state is set to receive up to about $484 million in federal relief for K-12 schools. That amounts to about 5 percent of the state's annual spending on K-12 schools, which was about $9.6 billion in 2018.
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The rising tensions over those funds could foreshadow months of disagreement over how all education relief funds should be allocated and who should be in charge of those decisions.
In a House working group on education needs due to the coronavirus pandemic, legislators are poised to recommend waiving all state testing requirements in public, private and home schools for the current school year. That includes waiving the K-3 reading testing and retention requirements.
They're also expected to recommend giving school districts more funding flexibility, delaying class size reduction, waiving school accountability measures and teacher preparation requirements and postponing many deadlines for reporting and spending from K-12 schools through community colleges and universities.
Most of those changes were recommended by unanimous vote of the State Board of Education over several weeks of emergency meetings. That board held its most recent meeting Thursday as well.
The tensions at both meetings centered on various types of federal relief funding for schools and how it will dovetail with the need for state funding.
- Up to $390 million will be allocated among the state's 120 school districts.
- An "emergency education fund" funneled to state governors through the U.S. Department of Education includes about $95 million for North Carolina, to be spent at the discretion of Gov. Roy Cooper.
DPI and the state board are still working through how the CARES Act funding to districts should be divided up. The board will vote on a formula at an upcoming board meeting. Federal guidelines say it should follow roughly the same lines as federal Title 1 guidelines, which are based partly on attendance and partly on need.
The money hasn't been released yet, but DPI leaders released a spreadsheet of the expected range for districts and schools.
Those federal funds, however, do come with restrictions on what they can be spent on. So state officials will have to be careful to reserve state spending for areas the federal funds won't cover, and figuring out what the unmet needs may be is a work in progress.
At the State Board of Education meeting, tensions flared over a request for about $250 million, submitted to the state budget office on behalf of the board Wednesday night. Chairman Eric Davis had approved it, but most board members were not even aware of it when Superintendent Mark Johnson brought it up at Thursday's meeting.
Johnson, who has often been at odds with Davis, accused the chairman of lacking transparency and of failing to let the board and Johnson weigh in on the request before it was sent out.
In the House committee meeting, lawmakers asked pointedly whether they would have any say over any of that federal funding.
Rep. Hugh Blackwell, R-Burke, said legislative budget-writers should try to work with the Governor's Office so the $95 million under Cooper's control "won't become some kind of slush fund."
Legislators are due back on April 28. The House is planning to hold a socially-distanced vote on an omnibus relief bill on April 30. It is expected to include both policy and funding changes for a range of areas. House leaders are hoping the Senate will pass it the following week.