Comments on April 21 Public School Advocacy Day at the NCGA by Xavier Adams, Orange High School teacher and 2022 NC Beginning Teacher of the Year
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Good morning, everyone, I am Xavier Adams. I am a teacher at Orange High School, and in 2022 I was named North Carolina’s Beginning Teacher of the Year.
While in this role, I have witnessed the incredible work that teachers are doing for their students across the state from Macon County to Pender County. In Macon County, I met a teacher that wrote a grant to develop a CTE career pathway for rural students to become pilots at no cost to them thanks to him and his district leaders partnering with their local airport to bring 6 professional aviation simulators to his classroom. Students in this class spoke to me with a sense of pride about the skills and leadership traits that they saw themselves building, as they showed me how to fly a virtual plane.
And, in Mount Airy, I met teachers that partnered with community organizations during covid-19 to transform an old activity bus into the renamed Blue Bear Bus. This bus travels the school district every summer to provide Title 1 students engaging STEAM and literacy programs and food. And, at high school football games, Occupational Course of Study students use this bus to serve refreshments to their community. Students across this district are able to receive a stellar education because it was designed and staffed with them specifically in mind.
These unique examples exemplify how teachers across the state consistently find community resources to make their students’ dreams come true.
In these same schools, I met educators that love their jobs immensely but have left their schools due to inadequate compensation. One passionate science teacher told me that she could not afford being a single-income household in an area with an increasing cost of rent, and an early-career teacher shared that it made more financial sense for her to become a stay-at-home parent rather than continue to work in her public school and lose money while paying for child care.
The life-changing opportunities that teachers are creating for their students and the obstacles that get in the way of retaining highly qualified educators reveals how fragile of a moment we are in: our public schools are doing their best to provide their students a sound basic education by working with treasured community partners. However, teachers should not and cannot continuously rely on a patchwork of non-renewable grants to try to continuously self-fund their students’ education. And, every student across the state should have access to specifically tailored learning opportunities that give them a sense of pride and belonging when they are at school.
The urgency of this moment requires us to speak honestly about what is happening in our state. We cannot continue to euphemistically say that the General Assembly has failed to both pass a state budget and to more fully fund our public schools as advised by the West Ed report, when this same legislative body deliberately overfunded private schools with 533 million public dollars – 87% of these ‘opportunity’ scholarships going to students that have never attended public schools. The General Assembly has deliberately passed income tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations that will result in the loss of 1 billion dollars available to the state budget over the next year. In other words, we are experiencing a policy manufactured sense of scarcity in our state budget that causes an unnecessary competition for educational resources between low-income families and wealthy families. Consequently, private schools receive more public dollars while public schools like Cook Literacy Model School in Winston-Salem and Madison Elementary in Guilford County are forced to close.
When our state forces public school doors to close, it closes the opportunities that are available to students, and this reality gets to the heart of why fully funding public schools matters: fully funding public education is about more than just giving students new laptops and paying teachers liveable wages; fully funded schools provide students the education they need to imagine and build the lives that they want for themselves and their communities. In this short session, the General Assembly has the opportunity and constitutional responsibility to fully fund both public education and the dreams of the students in our buildings.