By Jason Fife, NCPTA Member and Education Advocate
I am a product of North Carolina public schools.
I went to school in Bladen County.
I went on to attend a public university in North Carolina.
Now my son is a student in a public school in Durham.
That gives me a view into two places that seem very different—but are dealing with the same underlying problem: North Carolina is not funding public schools at the level it has already determined is necessary, and districts are being forced to make up the difference locally.
In Durham, the conversation is about pressure to keep popular programs and staff in place as budget cuts loom. Schools are crowded. Buildings are aging. Families are asking whether programs that made public schools attractive in the first place can keep up.
In Bladen County, the conversation is more basic.
Do we have enough staff to cover essential classes?
Can we support teachers so they don’t leave for more money elsewhere?
How far can the budget stretch before something has to give?
Those sound like different issues.
They are not.
Earlier this year, Durham Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Anthony Lewis sent a message to families outlining the district’s budget reality.
To maintain what already exists, the district needs about $10.9 million more in funding from the county. To address additional needs—transportation, maintenance, academic support—it identified another $20.8 million.
At the same time, Durham is expecting to lose millions in local funding as students enroll in charter schools. The district projects that about 26% of its local education funding will go to charter schools next year.
This is happening in one of the strongest-funded counties in the state. In fact, Durham County contributes about $6,022 per student in local funding, the fourth highest in North Carolina. And even here, the system does not add up.
Now look at Bladen County. Bladen’s local funding is about $2,756 per student—less than half of Durham’s.
According to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, teacher supplements in Bladen County average about $1,900, compared to more than $8,400 in Durham County. The total local operating budget for schools in Bladen is about $8.7 million, compared to more than $220 million in Durham.
To put that plainly: Durham can raise far more money locally because it houses more people with higher income and higher property values to tax. Bladen has fewer people and lower property values, which means even when residents are taxed, the total amount raised is much smaller.
But both counties are expected to do the same thing: take what the state provides and make up the difference themselves.
That difference—the gap between what schools receive and what they actually need—is not a guess. In a long-running court case called Leandro v. State of North Carolina, first decided in 1997 and reaffirmed multiple times since, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the state is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide every child with the opportunity for a sound basic education.
As part of that case, the state developed a detailed plan to determine what schools actually need.
That plan put numbers on the gap.
- Durham Public Schools would need about $70 million more to meet that standard
- Bladen County Schools would need about $14 million more
Those numbers are not political. They are the state’s own estimate of what adequacy requires.So now put the pieces together. Both counties are underfunded relative to what the state says is necessary. Both are expected to fill that gap locally. And neither can do it fully.
Durham shows what happens when a county can raise more money—it stretches further, but still falls short.
Bladen shows what happens when a county has less to work with—it runs into limits much faster.
Now add one more piece to the puzzle. While that gap remains unfilled, public dollars are being directed elsewhere.
Charter schools take funding away from local school districts in both Durham and Bladen counties. Private school vouchers provided by the state’s Opportunity Scholarship, recently expanded to include families with unlimited income whose students never enrolled in a public school, are funded with dollars from our state taxes.
Last year in Bladen County, about $1.1 million in voucher funding went to families last year, but only about $637,000 of that went to schools inside the county. The rest left.
That means public dollars raised in and for the community members of Bladen County are not fully supporting schools in that community. This is not about whether families should have choices.
It is about timing and priority. Because right now, the state is:
- acknowledging that public schools are underfunded
- estimating how much it would take to fix that
- and still directing significant public funding into charter expansion and private school tuition
At the same time, districts are being forced to make visible tradeoffs.
In Wake County, one of the largest districts in the state, leaders proposed $18 million in cuts to special education services, including the loss of more than 100 positions, and are now looking for other places in the budget to make cuts after community outcry over the proposed special ed cuts.
That is not a sign that Wake County residents suddenly stopped prioritizing students or special education. It is a signal that the same gap in state funding is visible there, too.
So the question is unavoidable. If the state already knows what it costs to fund public schools adequately, why are we sending public dollars elsewhere before that obligation is met?
This is not a Durham problem.
It is not a Bladen problem.
It is a statewide policy issue with uneven local consequences that are far worse in rural communities that can’t raise the same local dollars to hide it.
In places like Wake and Durham, it means cutting things families expect—programs, supports, opportunities—because local dollars are already stretched covering what the state doesn’t fund.In places like Bladen, it means starting behind and being asked to make up the difference without the same local capacity to do it.
Different realities. Same gap.
And until that gap is closed at the state level, no amount of local effort—no matter how strong or how committed—will be enough to overcome it.