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Thousands of teachers are expected to rally Friday in Raleigh’s Halifax Mall in support of greater investment in public schools. At least 13 school districts across the state—from Asheville to Pitt County—have canceled classes Friday due to a high number of teacher leave requests to attend the event.
Wake County, the state’s largest district, already had a teacher work day planned for many of its schools that day. The board overseeing the next largest, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, voted unanimously to make Friday an optional teacher work day after more than 1,875 of its roughly 9,000 education requested leave, The Charlotte Observer reported. Other districts that will not be holding classes include Guilford, Winston-Salem/Forsyth, Durham, Alamance-Burlington, Orange, Chatham, and Chapel Hill-Carrboro.
The North Carolina Association of Educators announced the “Kids Over Corporations” event following the early April collapse of the Leandro lawsuit, a long-running case that tested the state’s constitutional guarantee of a “sound, basic education.” A remediation plan developed during that litigation called for investing billions of dollars more, in part to make teacher pay more competitive with neighboring states.
A National Education Association report released this week ranked North Carolina’s average teacher salary 43rd in the nation, lagging neighboring states last school year by between $2,500 and $9,300 and trailing the national average by more than $16,200.
Due to the ongoing impasse between the state House and Senate on a budget and an increase in benefit costs, many teachers in the state took an effective pay cut this year. Accounting for inflation, the real value of their pay, on average, has dropped about 10% over the past decade, according to the report.
In the meantime, the state has been cutting taxes. Nonpartisan fiscal analysts project that phasing out the corporate income tax, in combination with pre-set reductions in the personal income tax, will produce a structural deficit in the state budget by fiscal year 2028. The cuts are at the heart of the protracted budget negotiations—leaders of the state House want to pause them and give educators substantial raises, while state Senate leaders prefer to proceed with the tax cuts, boosting educators’ pay less. State lawmakers are also considering imposing limits on local property taxes, which are used to build and renovate school facilities, supplement teacher salaries, and pay for other local priorities, such as hiring more mental health specialists.
NCAE, the public school employees union, is calling for a raise of at least 25% for all school employees, an end to corporate tax breaks and private school vouchers, and funding for modern facilities, free school meals, and more health professionals.