State Board of Education floats $100M for school social workers, nurses
North Carolina education leaders are asking state lawmakers for hundreds of millions more dollars for the state’s schools.
The State Board of Education voted Thursday, without opposition, to make the requests, which include $100 million to fund 1,000 more nurses and social workers in most of the state's counties. The board also asked lawmakers and Gov. Roy Cooper to fully fund the court-approved remedial plan in the long-running education adequacy lawsuit known as Leandro — an effort that would include the $100 million for nurses and social workers as well as about a billion dollars for additional educational resources.
“The bottom line is, what can we do for children to make it better for their future?” Board Member Wendell Hall said.
The requests, on which the board worked with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and Superintendent Catherine Truitt, include significant policy changes, as well.
The board is asking lawmakers to fund services for students with disabilities based on students’ needs and to pilot a new program that would raise teacher pay while tying teachers’ continued employment to student performance.
Currently, funding for students with disabilities is capped and not based on need, and teachers’ continued employment is based on the passage of licensure exams and continuing education. The teacher licensure proposal has generated controversy for tying employment to student outcome measurements that have yet to be determined.
Board Chairman Eric Davis said these proposals are all part of the court-approved plan in the Leandro case to improve schools that the board has already agreed to. Lawmakers have not agreed to it.
But the board’s vote Thursday re-states its position in support of the plan as lawmakers have intervened in the lawsuit to stop it from happening. Some of the accompanying requests for funding and policy changes represent more specific programs related to the plan.
That lawsuit, filed in 1994 by five lower-income school boards and families of students who attend them, alleged the state did not ensure students were provided access to an adequate education as promised by the state’s Constitution. The state Supreme Court agreed to an extent in 2004 and issued another ruling this past November that ordered the state to fund part of the remedial plan. The order concerned only last fiscal year and this fiscal year, ending June 30, though the plan concerns many more years beyond that.
Major funding, major changes
State Board of Education members and other state education leaders say North Carolina needs hundreds more school nurses and social workers to meet the needs of the state’s children and to keep educators from having to things they are less qualified to do, such as administering students’ medications. The $100 million would only fund a nurse or social worker at schools in the state’s less economically prosperous counties.
Schools would apply for the funds, which would allow the state to more easily monitor how the funds are spent, said Jamey Falkenbury, director of government affairs at the state Department of Public Instruction.
North Carolina needs 1,000 more nurses to ensure a nurse is employed at each school in those counties. Statewide, it needs even more. North Carolina needs about 4,000 more social workers to meet nationally recommend ratios of students per social worker.
North Carolina's ratios of students to support professionals are much lower than national groups for those professionals recommend.
The remedial plan in the Leandro lawsuit calls for $212.6 million next year and $345.3 million the year after that for support professionals broadly, including counselors and psychologists.
A report to lawmakers from the state Department of Public Instruction this fall showed North Carolina has:
- One school nurse for every 890 students and less than one nurse per school
- One school social worker for every 1,025 students — more than four times the recommended ratio of one social worker for every 250 students
- One school counselor for every 335 students, which is more than the recommended ratio of one counselor for every 250 students
- One school psychologist for every 1,815 students, nearly four times the recommended ratio of one school psychologist for every 500 students
The social workers and nurses would be for school systems in counties the state considers more economically distressed. That’s Tier 1 and Tier 2 counties, which by law are only 80 of the state’s 100 counties.
Many more populous counties wouldn’t be eligible, such as Wake, Durham, Johnston, Orange, Chatham, Moore and Mecklenberg counties.
Many others in the WRAL News coverage area would be, such as Cumberland, Franklin, Nash, Edgecombe, Harnett, Lee, Person, Granville, Sampson, Robseon, Hoke, Vance, Halifax, Northampton, Wilson and Warren counties.
The State Board of Education’s package of requests also includes several other items:
- Funding a pilot program to overhaul teacher licensure that would drastically increase pay while also tying a teacher’s ability to obtain or maintain a license to student outcomes. The cost of that pilot will depend on the schools that opt into it and how much of a raise lawmakers decide to give those teachers.
- Developing and funding a formula to educate students with disabilities based on their needs, versus a flat amount of money for each student that’s capped at thousands of students fewer than those identified as having disabilities. The amount needed for that is still under development.
- Continuing the need-based capital grants that provided $800 million more over the past two years
- Continuing the $41.7 million in one-time school safety grants provided last year for safety training and equipment
- Hiring 17 full-time equivalent staff, at a cost of $2.4 million, to help principals at lower-performing schools improve their schools
- Hiring 10 more full-time equivalent employees to speed up the hiring process for bus drivers, at a cost of $350,000
- Allow school districts who can’t hire school psychologists to use their dedicated funding to hire contractors instead
Board, General Assembly at odds
The plan adopted in the lawsuit would add at least a billion in new education spending next year alone. It would also increase funding for students with disabilities and for pre-kindergarten and early childhood programs.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has supported the plan. But he and Republican legislative leaders have failed to agree on much of the funding for it other than employee raises. Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, and state House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, note they did not work on the plan and have contested its implementation as intervenors in the lawsuit.
In November, the then-Democratic-majority state Supreme Court ordered state executives to transfer funds for the plan for last year and this year. The order did not address the next two years, which is what the board’s requests concerns.
The General Assembly begins its next session on Wednesday, and they will take up budgeting for the next two years.
On Wednesday, Davis said the state has already made significant progress toward improving the state’s schools.
“We’re already doing a lot in this comprehensive plan,” Davis said. He noted the pilot program for teacher licensure, efforts to hire coaches for literacy and school turnaround, discussions on changing how the state assesses school performance, additional career counseling, new intensive literacy training and other things. The state has not developed a plan to change how school performance is assessed or implemented a pilot program for teacher licensure. Both of those things would required legislative approval.
The General Assembly can reject or modify the board’s requests. Last year, the board asked for a school psychologist internship program to shore up the number of qualified applicants in the state for vacant school psychologist positions, as area universities are not graduating as many candidates as their are openings each year. That request did not make it into a final budget.
The board voted Thursday to ask again, for a $5 million internship program Falkenbury said would “really help with the pipeline” to hire school psychologists.
The board is additionally asking for $10 million to raise pay for social workers with Master’s degrees. Lawmakers eliminated higher pay for Master’s degrees in 2013 teachers, social workers and others.
