The Fixer

At her first school board meeting as interim superintendent in June, Catty Moore broke down Winston-Salem/Forsyth County schools’ massive budget shortfall with her signature directness. 

She started with the top-line number: $42 million. “It’s a big number, a kind of scary number,” said Moore, who came out of retirement to help the district through the crisis. “A lot of people want to know, ‘Well, how did we get here?’ And so I want to give some specifics.”

First, she said, the district spent more on non-instructional staff like custodians and data managers than the state allocated for that purpose. It similarly exceeded state funding for transportation and for children with special needs. 

On top of that, the district’s previous budget planners had failed to account for a large contract for substitute teachers, she said. In the 2023-24 school year, federal pandemic relief funds had paid for the substitutes. Then that funding ended. The contract didn’t. 

“That’s $12 million of a contract that didn’t have funds in the budget, OK?” Moore said, pausing to check for understanding among the roughly two dozen people in the room. 

She was only halfway through her list. 

Another problem: the district’s relationship with charter schools, which are public but operate independently from the district. The district’s finance staff has to estimate how many local students will attend charter schools, and then provide a corresponding amount of money to them. But they don’t know the true number of students attending charters until the school year starts, and last year’s estimate was too low. 

The school district had also received less than it requested from the county board of commissioners, Moore said. Finance staff had failed to account for this, adding another $6.5 million to the shortfall. 

Add to that hole several invoices that had been rolled over from one fiscal year to another. Rollovers aren’t unheard of, she said, but finance staff should try to avoid putting a dent in future budgets. 

The staffing projection underlying the 2024-25 budget was faulty, too. The district overestimated how many vacant jobs it would have by 100 positions. 

The main causes of the shortfall, Moore said, were “miscalculations, errors, and oversights.”

The district was in a hole so big it probably would have to lay off hundreds of employees. About 85 percent of its budget went toward paying people, and much of the rest went toward non-negotiable expenses like lights, heating, and air conditioning. 

“When you don’t have the money, you’ve got to make decisions and choices, and they’re going to be hard and they’re going to hurt,” she said.

Moore, who was a classroom teacher for several years before moving into administration in Wake County, has delivered that lesson over and over since June, when she took the helm of North Carolina’s fourth-largest school district, responsible for educating about 49,000 students. 

It didn’t take long for her to realize that her success in shoring up the budget in Winston-Salem and preventing an exodus of students would depend on building community understanding about school finance. It was important for rebuilding trust and recruiting allies, as well as for preventing a repeat situation. 

She gave the talk to district employee groups, parents, students, elected officials, equity advocates, business leaders, and philanthropists. “Everyone needs a Finance 101 in order to really be invested, knowledgeable stakeholders because that’s the only way that this doesn’t happen again,” Moore said. 

The financial problem alone was daunting—the biggest challenge for a school leader in at least 50 years, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the N.C. School Superintendents’ Association. And then there was the crisis of faith. To survive, public schools must have community trust, and in Winston-Salem, that trust was shattered.

Not everyone would be willing to take a job with such high stakes. For Moore, though, the stakes are what made the job appealing.

“I have an abiding belief that our public schools are incredibly important to our communities from a quality-of-life perspective,” Moore told The Assembly. When “the negativity that is sometimes part of the narrative of public schools starts to take hold, I feel that. And if I can help, I want to try.”

From Y’all to We

State education leaders were relieved she was willing to step in. “When the reputation of any one district is challenged, then the reputation of every district is at risk,” said Eric Davis, chair of the State Board of Education, on which Moore also serves. 

Public schools were already under unprecedented pressure, he said, with Republican politicians in Raleigh and Washington, D.C., increasingly labeling traditional public schools as “failing” and withholding funds while promoting and funding alternatives.

Moore, 62, is perhaps the most prominent member of North Carolina’s public school rescue crew—about a half-dozen retired superintendents willing to take short-term contracts to help a school district through a particularly tumultuous period. “We are really fortunate that these courageous leaders who have given their entire career to our students—at a time when, justifiably, they could just kick back and relax—they get back in the arena,” Davis said.

“When you don’t have the money, you’ve got to make decisions and choices, and they’re going to be hard and they’re going to hurt.”

Catty Moore, interim superintendent

Over time, Moore has refined her lesson. Now, she emphasizes that the district has two issues: paying back what it overspent in the last fiscal year and balancing this school year’s budget. 

She also gives more attention to the fact that North Carolina school districts, unlike districts in most other states, have no taxing authority. “We cannot raise revenue, so if I have to pay something back, I either take it out of the next year’s budget or somebody gives it to me in the form of either an appropriation or a loan,” she said. 

“I think that point has resonated with some folks in the community because it is like plain talk,” she said. “And it helps people understand how difficult the path out of this is.”

In early October, Moore gave her budget presentation to the district’s Teacher Advisory Council. She told the 50 or 60 teachers in the room that she wanted them, too, to serve as ambassadors in the community, providing accurate information about what is happening in the district. At the end of the meeting, one of the teachers thanked her for coming to speak with them in person and showing her “human side.” 

Sitting in her undecorated office at district headquarters the following day, Moore recalled the teacher saying that she had emailed Moore to ask her to stop using “we” when talking about the district because Moore’s appointment is temporary. 

“That was you?” Moore said she responded. “Thank you for sending it. I use your email as an example with the leadership team, because folks need to understand the depth of consternation and anxiety and how people are responding and truly feeling about what’s happened. 

“I won’t be here after November 30. I completely understand why you are saying that, but I also know that I can’t do this work and say, ‘y’all, y’all, y’all, y’all, y’all, you did this, you did that, you did this.’ I am here. I am part of whatever the steps out of it are. So it is ‘we.’ For me. I don’t know how to do this work any other way.’”

‘100 Percent Stressed, But 100 Percent Committed’

By many accounts, Moore is the most highly respected superintendent in the state, a reputation largely built on how she led Wake County schools through the pandemic. She was the district’s first female superintendent, as well as the first Latina to hold the position. Over her tenure, Moore projected calm and steadiness, but also earned loyalty by showing some vulnerability.

Sam Thorp, who oversees superintendent searches for the North Carolina School Boards Association, said he noticed something unusual when people talked about her: “People really and truly would tear up—I’m talking about staff, parents, students, folks who were her students I don’t know how long ago.”

“When the reputation of any one district is challenged, then the reputation of every district is at risk.”

Eric Davis, chair of the State Board of Education

Moore earned the respect and affection of some of the state’s most senior superintendents, too. As the pandemic raged, she agreed to speak at a seminar for aspiring principals at N.C. State University taught by Bill Harrison, the former superintendent of Cumberland, Hoke, Orange, and Alamance schools and former chairman of the State Board of Education. In response to a question about how she was dealing with her responsibilities amid the turmoil, she said, “I’m 100 percent stressed, but 100 percent committed,” Harrison recalled. 

“She would acknowledge that to her team,” he said. “That stuck with me.” 

Moore was part of a superintendent mutual support network born out of the pandemic, said Rodney Shotwell, who led Rockingham County schools for 16 years and retired in 2022. “There’s nothing like walking through a gauntlet of parents from your office all the way down to a packed boardroom,” he said. “Sometimes you just need to talk to somebody about a situation because really, only another superintendent can understand what you’re going through.” 

As retired superintendents willing to dive into the state’s toughest cases, Moore and Shotwell still lean on each other. “The thing I’ve always appreciated about her is that she really approaches problems with a very keen eye, to look at everything from all angles before she makes a decision,” Shotwell said. “She weighs the good and the bad of every decision that she makes, and ultimately, she makes the decisions that are going to be in the best interest of the children.”

Moore retired in June 2023 after five years as superintendent and 35 as an educator, almost all in Wake County. She wanted to spend more time with family, especially a granddaughter about to enter kindergarten. But she was hinting even before she left the job that she didn’t plan to stay on the sidelines for long.

She accepted an appointment to the State Board of Education in October 2023 after moving to Union County. She was eager to learn more about educational needs across the state, how the Department of Public Instruction supports schools and districts, and how the State Board works. “I felt like it would be a good opportunity that wasn’t a 9-to-5, day-to-day kind of role, so I said yes,” she said.

Then, in early 2024, Moore got a call from a colleague in Durham. The district had hired consultants to study how the pay of its classified employees—teaching assistants, bus drivers, and other non-licensed staff—compared to market rates. But it botched the implementation of the pay raises, budgeting for pay that corresponded to employees’ years of state service while paying them for relevant experience beyond that. 

After the district announced in January 2024 that it had overpaid some staff and was revoking the raises, hundreds of district employees participated in sickouts coordinated by the Durham Association of Educators, temporarily closing more than a dozen schools. 

“I have an abiding belief that our public schools are incredibly important to our communities from a quality-of-life perspective.”

Catty Moore, interim superintendent

At that point, Moore was eligible to accept a six-month interim role without impacting her state benefits. Despite the challenges, she saw a path to rebuilding trust and preserving work she considered visionary. So she took the job.

A few months later, in cooperation with the Durham Association of Educators, Moore secured a major boost to the county’s funding of the school system. The district, on firmer financial footing and with better labor relations, received more than 100 applications to be its next permanent superintendent.

Forsyth County’s school board took note. Their superintendent, Tricia McManus, announced her retirement in April, after the district’s budget shortfall became public and the district’s chief financial officer, Thomas Kranz, said he would resign. 

Moore said she received a call from a colleague in Winston-Salem and agreed to speak with the board chair about possibly serving as interim superintendent. After that conversation and a trip abroad, Moore submitted her application. Her motivations were the same as when she applied in Durham, Moore said.

Because of her success in the Bull City, her application “immediately rose to the top of the pile,” said Alex Bohannon, the vice chair of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board.

‘A Better Chance of Finding a Unicorn’

In both Durham and Winston-Salem, Moore confronted an underappreciated challenge in leading public schools right now: a shortage of qualified chief finance officers.

“You’ve got a better chance finding a unicorn than trying to find a CFO in the state,” said Shotwell, who served as interim last year in Weldon, another financially struggling district.

The issue isn’t just that the pay is lower and the stress is higher than most finance managers would find in the private sector. It’s also that public school finances in North Carolina—depending heavily on “allotments” prescribed by the General Assembly—are unusually complicated. Experienced accountants in private business or even in school finance in another state aren’t necessarily prepared to do the job well, current and former administrators say.

“When you sit down in that finance officer seat, you got accounts payable, you got fixed assets, you got internal controls, you got payroll—you got all these different things coming at you, and then you’ve got to learn how public schools are funded,” said Pam Satterfield, executive director of the North Carolina Association of School Business Officials. “I wish I could say you can learn it in six months, but you can’t. It takes a year at least.”

One tricky aspect of the system is that there are several different allotment types, each coming with different rules. Some allotments are for a specific dollar amount while others are for a number of positions. Decisions about which pot of money to use for which costs can make a huge difference for the resources available to a school district. Seasoned administrators, for example, know that you should pay your highest-paid teachers out of position allotments because the state will pay those salaries no matter how high they are; other allotment types have caps.

Kranz, the former CFO for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County schools, came from Virginia in 2022 and had no previous experience in North Carolina. Don Martin, who is chair of the county commission and served 19 years as superintendent of the county’s schools, thinks that was a major underlying cause of the crisis.

Kranz did not respond to The Assembly’s interview request. Two weeks before his abrupt resignation, he told a school board member that his department had “failed.” The annual audit had shown that the district had overspent its 2023-24 budget by $16 million, forcing it to dip into reserves.

Kranz “basically never figured out how it was done,” Martin said. More than $200 million in federal pandemic relief money flowed into the county with very few restrictions. “Essentially that helped him. Those dollars helped mask the first year’s over-staffing.” 

The end of the pandemic funding revealed the extent of the problem. The two prior chief financial officers in the district also had limited experience, Martin said. One was also from Virginia; the other had worked in North Carolina, but only as a budget manager, responsible for executing a budget, not compiling one.

“You’ve got a better chance finding a unicorn than trying to find a CFO in the state.”

Rodney Shotwell, former Rockingham County superintendent

Some districts, knowing the difficulty of hiring a chief financial officer, prioritize “growing their own” by training people for the role, said Satterfield. But that’s not what Moore found in Winston-Salem or Durham; she said neither district’s former CFO had devoted attention to building their staff’s skills in that way. Both crises required significant help from outside consultants. 

That got Moore thinking about possible statewide solutions. As a member of the State Board of Education, she’s now involved in discussions about how to improve the pipeline of chief finance officers. One idea she has been mulling is a possible partnership with the university system to create a certification, perhaps something like a professional license.

For the Future

The size of the budget hole in Winston-Salem turned out to be even larger than it appeared when Moore accepted the job. 

She soon discovered that the district hadn’t been handling its payroll taxes properly and that some capital funds and grant funds had been inappropriately spent on local operating costs. Meanwhile, more invoices rolled in. By late June, Moore estimated the deficit was actually $46 million.

Cuts could be required for the district to pay back that debt, Moore told the school board at its August 12 meeting, but the amount would depend on the deals reached with creditors. 

Additional cuts—somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million—would be required to balance the 2025-26 budget. The district had been adding staff while its enrollment fell, a pattern that was unsustainable.

Moore said she didn’t want her recommendations to be interpreted as commentary on whether the district needed all the people it currently employed: “As a district and in this state we are in a difficult position regarding how our schools are funded, how our personnel allocations are made, and how local districts are picking up a difference that is a state obligation.”

In an even tone, she itemized the financial consultants’ recommendations and the requirements of the district’s reduction-in-force policy. But when she tried to articulate the number of people who could lose their jobs, her voice caught. More than 10 seconds passed. “300 to 350,” she said finally. The previous school year, the district had employed almost 6,800 people.

The district had already eliminated 81 central office positions. It had also cut contracts, leases, some benefits like cell phones, and ended transportation for children who go to school outside of their residential zone, an unusual offering that cost roughly $3.5 million a year.

The new proposal came with a whole different level of pain. “All of the folks that are encompassed in that number are part of the community that has supported and built this district and didn’t do anything wrong,” Moore said later, tearing up as she thought back to that meeting. “It had to be done. That is the hardest part.”

The board approved a modified reduction-in-force plan the following week—343 positions were eliminated with an option for administrators with a teaching license to move back into the classroom. The plan also reduced the months of employment for 288 positions—they might be paid 10 months of the year instead of 12, for example—and imposed central office furloughs. 

And other cuts followed. Because enrollment numbers came in below projections, the district eliminated the positions of 71 teachers, 12 teaching assistants, 14.5 secretaries, two part-time instructional facilitators, and two part-time social workers in September. Roughly 200 custodians could be laid off later this month as part of a deal to roll $4.2 million in debt to a custodial company into a new 10-year contract. (Those employees would be guaranteed jobs with the contractor at the same pay rate and higher, and 35 custodians with more than 15 years of experience would remain employed by the district.)

Students in many schools mourned the loss of familiar faces. Hundreds of students across the district walked out to show support for their educators. A letter from the principal of Kimberley Park Elementary School in Winston-Salem noted that an emotional support dog was present when they gathered students to tell them that one of the school’s assistant principals had been transferred to another school and the other would be on campus only half-time. The reduction in force hit assistant principals and educators serving children with special needs particularly hard.

Yasmain Rice, who has a daughter in the third grade at Union Cross Elementary School in Kernersville, said she thought the cuts were threatening the integrity of school communities. “With children, familiarity, I think, is everything,” said Rice, who is a member of the Superintendent’s Parent and Guardian Advisory Council. “When you start stripping away that familiarity among the peers and the staff and the team, I think you can definitely tell a difference.”

She said the cuts have inspired many parents she knows to look outside the district for other educational options. Her own daughter asked to be homeschooled, Rice said, in part because teachers were too busy to notice when she was being bullied, though the situation has improved. 

“When you start stripping away that familiarity among the peers and the staff and the team, I think you can definitely tell a difference.”

Yasmain Rice, parent

Mauri Booth, a former member of the parents’ council, said in an email that she opted to send her children to a charter school this year.

Prominent local boosters for public schools have supported Moore through the excruciating decisions. “I can’t imagine anyone handling this any better than she has,” said Marni Eisner, executive director of the Education Foundation for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public Schools, a nonprofit formed in 2023 to supplement school funding. 

Moore’s frankness and commitment to telling and retelling the budget story have been key. 

“When you get a clear understanding of how we got here, and you know what the causes are, it can really help you to have confidence that there’s a way out,” said LaTida Smith, executive director of the Winston-Salem Foundation, a century-old community foundation that focuses on the economy and education. 

There are signs that Moore’s many lessons on school finance are working to rebuild trust.

The State Board of Education pushed back the start date for adding interest penalties on the debt the district owes the Department of Public Instruction. 

After an audit by the Republican-led State Auditor’s Office confirmed Moore’s account of how the district amassed its debt, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers representing Forsyth County agreed to help persuade their legislative colleagues to offer the district a loan of about $20 million. The loan is unlikely to materialize before next spring when the General Assembly reconvenes for its short session.

But in early October, the county commission agreed to a plan under which it will forgive debt in an amount that matches what the district can bring in from private donors, up to $5 million. Big donations soon began rolling in.

At the school board’s October 14 meeting, Robert Clark, a Republican city council member who also chairs the board of the Twin City Development Foundation, announced that the foundation had decided to give the district $400,000 to pay down debt. He challenged other charitable organizations to do the same. 

“This is a moment that calls for collective action,” Clark said. “For the future of our children and our entire community, we must all lend a hand.”

Within a week, the Winston-Salem Foundation announced that it would donate $500,000 to pay down the debt. Smith and Eisner said that a broader fundraising effort involving several other community partners was halfway to its $3 million goal.

The final budget resolution is due October 28, the same day the school board is slated to decide whether to close an underenrolled elementary school in a historically Black neighborhood. The district’s debt repayment plan is due to the State Board of Education on November 4. 

There are probably more hard decisions coming, Moore says. But many of those will be for the next superintendent to tackle. Don Phipps, Caldwell County’s superintendent and president of the state School Superintendents’ Association, takes over December 1. 

“I have some dismay around knowing that I’m not here for some of that,” she said, “that I’ll be gone and they’ll still be recovering. But I have infinite hope that whoever comes into this role next will be able to continue the rebuilding of trust and confidence that’s needed.”