Governor Perdue’s Budget Leads to Teacher Layoffs

Wake School Leaders: Education Budget is “Fiscally Irresponsible”

Raleigh, N.C. – Wake County school leaders, including Superintendent Del Burns, are sounding the alarm on a state budget that has led to fewer teachers and more students in classrooms around the state. Governor Perdue and legislative Democrats passed a state budget containing more than $990 million in tax increases and justified the tax hikes as necessary to keep from reducing classroom personnel in the state’s public schools. However that same budget, over the course of the next two years, makes more than $500 million in cuts to education, cuts that are being passed down to local school districts where reductions, such as those being seen in Wake County are being made.

Governor Perdue, State Board of Education Chairman Bill Harrison, and the state’s teacher’s union, which provided significant financial support to Democrats in last year’s elections, are now waging a political battle with the state’s largest school district saying that although Perdue and legislative Democrats left the money out of the budget for education, they expect local leaders to rely on federal stimulus dollars to rehire teachers despite the fact that federal stimulus money is temporary in nature.

“But Wake school leaders say it would be ‘fiscally irresponsible’ to rely too heavily on short-term stimulus dollars to pay for ongoing expenses such as teacher salaries. They say they can’t count on the economy improving two years from now to replace the stimulus money when it runs out.” (“Wake and state trade blame,” News & Observer, 8/31/09)

600 of the 1,496 teachers and other school employees in Wake County whose contracts were not automatically renewed have not been rehired due to the Democrats’ cuts to the state’s education budget.

Senate Republican Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) said, “Most people can accept that some politicians will say that tax increases are needed to keep from laying-off teachers; what people do not understand is politicians raising taxes by $990 million to ‘save’ education and in the same budget eliminating classroom teaching positions. It is the height of audacity for Governor Perdue to now blame local school leaders for cuts she forced them to make with her state budget. She and legislative Democrats tried to have it both ways, and local school leaders have now called them out. Superintendent Burns is right – it would be fiscally irresponsible for local leaders to rely on temporary money to cover recurring expenses and to continue to hold teachers in limbo as to whether their jobs will still be there in the future. The reality is the huge tax increases recently passed by Democrats were not for the purpose of protecting classroom education; those tax hikes were to protect wasteful spending in the state budget.”

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