GOP should join governor in education push
Published March 10, 2017
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, March 5, 2017.
With his first budget proposal, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has staked out the high ground in supporting public education. We hope the state legislature will join him there.
Cooper released his proposed budget Wednesday. It would restore many of the standards and provisions from which teachers and children benefitted before the Great Recession forced legislators on the left and on the right to cut them.
With the economy largely recovered, the time is right.
But the road to right is a long one.
The GOP-dominated legislature will also be hammering out its own proposed budget. For the last four years, with a Republican governor, there was at least some measure of cooperation between the legislature and that governor in reconciling their proposed budgets. But these days, it’s almost like if Cooper said the sky is blue, GOP legislative leaders would attack him for being disingenuous.
That said, Cooper’s got some good ideas in his proposal that the GOP should consider.
Among the provisions are a 10-percent raise to bring teacher salaries up to a $55,000 average by 2019. School-based administrators would also see their pay increased by an average of 6.5 percent and all other state employees by 2 percent or $800, whichever is higher, the Journal’s Arika Herron reported.
The governor’s budget supports early childhood education for an additional 4,700 Pre-K spots as well as childcare subsidies. It supports restoring the Child Care Tax Credit, which would certainly help working families.
It would invest $30 million in education lottery funds to purchase new instructional materials and hire more staff, giving schools the flexibility to hire for the positions they need most. Another $10 million in lottery funds would go to “transformation services” — planning and coaching support for low-performing schools, the Journal reported.
In addition, the budget calls for giving $5 million each year for digital learning professional development and expanding the summer Governor’s School program.
It would also give teachers a $150 stipend to cover classroom supplies, so they wouldn’t have to pay for them from their own pockets anymore, a provision everyone should cheer.
The governor’s budget would also bring back the N.C. Teaching Fellows program, a relatively inexpensive but effective program that was cut for no good reason.
The total for Cooper’s education budget would be $13.4 billion — about $9.3 billion of that total on the state’s K-to-12 system, the Journal reported.
We hope the legislature will incorporate at least some of the governor’s ideas into its proposed budget. Once its chambers agree on that budget in the next few months, they’ll submit it to the governor for his approval. Even if he vetoed a budget weak on education, the legislature could still likely override that veto. It has the power.
But instead of power plays, we invite the legislature to put the children, our future, first. Gov. Cooper’s education proposals do that.
