The North Carolina House of Representatives’ proposed budget would double the financial assistance for prospective teachers in harder-to-staff fields and raise the cap on the number of students with disabilities that the state will fund.

Those are among the biggest K-12 education proposals in the House’s budget, partially unveiled this week. Salary schedule proposals could be released as soon as Monday.

Other WRAL Top Stories

Portions of the budget draft that were released Thursday have proposals on a number of issues that are top of mind in school communities. Beyond the shortage of qualified teachers and struggles to fund special education, the proposal also addresses improving literacy, hiring more school psychologists and even social media education.

The Wake County Public School System also found itself implicated in a few proposals that were of concern to local school board members, including more exemptions to kindergarten through third-grade class size requirements and a study on how to shore up the system’s struggling and aging heating, ventilation and air conditioning infrastructure.

Raising limits on students with disabilities

The budget would move the cap on special education funding from 13% of a school system's student body to 13.25% of a school system's student body. Currently, most school systems and charter schools identify more than 13% of their students as students with disabilities, but the state only funds services for 13%, effectively diluting the amount of funding per student.

Lawmakers have for decades ordered studies on a better way to fund special education, which currently is funded at a flat amount for every student, regardless of the severity of their disability, up to 13% of students. But lawmakers haven’t adopted another method of funding those students. From 1993 until 2021, that cap was 12.5%.

Lawmakers have gradually raised the cap since 2021 and ordered another study on how the state could fund special education using tiers based on the severity of their disabilities.

That study was completed last year and sent to lawmakers and anticipated more than $200 million in additional funding would be needed via state and federal sources.

Despite optimism last year from former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt, the Senate budget included no changes to special education funding, and the House budget is suggesting a middle-ground solution by increasing the cap. That would cost the state an additional $10.6 million under the House proposal.

Shifting charter school oversight

The House budget would largely cut the state superintendent and State Board of Education out of the oversight of the state's charter schools, rendering final decision-making to the Charter School Review Board.

Lawmakers shifted the final say over charter school approval to the review board in 2023, but left the state superintendent in charge of hiring the executive director of the Office of Charter Schools and some other oversight and left the State Board of Education in charge of approving rules for charter schools.

The proposed House budget would shift those powers over to the Charter School Review Board.

Expanded teacher training

The House and Senate took dramatically different approaches to the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program, which provides forgivable loans and mentorship to college students who commit to teaching in the state after college in a subject area that schools struggle to hire in.

The Senate budget proposal cuts mentorship programs for the program, saving $600,000.

The House budget would double the assistance that fellows would get and expand the fields of teaching that would be covered by the program.

The House budget proposes changing the amount of forgivable loans from $5,000 per academic year to $10,000 per academic year.

People who plan to become middle school or high school language arts teachers or career and technical education teachers would now qualify for the program, as well as any fellows who become licensed in special education and spend at least 80% of their work time on special education. Full-time special education teachers already qualify.

Separately, the budget would also expand teacher apprenticeships and provide them with salary stipends of up to $7,500. Their mentor teachers would get stipends of up to $5,000.

Both the House and Senate budgets would repeal the Future Teachers of North Carolina program, which hosts symposia to recruit high schoolers to the profession.

More funding for literacy

The proposed House budget would: 

  • Provide $10 million in annual funding for training middle school teachers and principals in research-backed reading instruction. All pre-school through fifth-grade teachers received intensive training on this from 2021 through 2024, and many education leaders have argued middle school teachers would benefit, as well, in the event they have students who are still struggling to read.
    • Continue funding for a middle school literacy program that the prior Superintendent of Public Instruction, Catherine Truitt, objected to as contrary to research-backed reading education. The budget would provide $1.2 million to Failure Free Reading.
      • Expand diagnostic reading assessments to fourth and fifth grade students, costing $1.4 million annually. Those assessments are currently done only for kindergarten through third-grade students. Parents are notified if their children are showing difficulty with reading development.
        • Provide every pre-kindergarten student in the state with a dyslexia screening that would be shared with their kindergarten teacher once they begin kindergarten. NC Pre-K teachers and administrators would get training on working with students who exhibit signs of dyslexia.

          Social media, school lunches and HVAC

          The House spending plan tackles a variety of other issues, ranging from lunches to air-conditioning solutions.  

          • Like the Senate budget, the House proposal would require schools to provide children with a standard school lunch, regardless of how much debt they have. Some schools provide alternative meals or only snacks if students are too far in debt.
            • It would require all elementary schools to provide performing arts and visual arts at least once per week, lasting at least 30 minutes. It's unclear how many schools don't have an art or music teacher.
              • It would require schools to teach students about the downsides of social media, as well as its "effects on health, including social, emotional, and physical effects." Students would learn about the consequences of social media use twice in elementary school, once in middle school and once in high school. Schools would be required to teach them about social media addiction, misinformation, manipulation, cyberbullying, personal security and the permanency of the Internet, among many other things.
                • The Wake County Public School System would get $500,000 to study "high-efficiency, next generation" heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and chiller solutions at its schools. The district has more than $200 million in deferred maintenance for HVAC systems, on top of ongoing HVAC maintenance costs. Upgrading to more modern HVAC solutions — which can be costlier up front but cheaper over their lifespan — can be challenging for schools with infrastructure and staffing designed for older systems.
                  • The spending proposal seeks to improve schools' ability to hire school psychologists by allowing school psychologists from certain other states to directly transfer their licenses to North Carolina. They would do so through an interstate compact. North Carolina's universities aren't graduating enough school psychologists to fill every job in the state, but some states produce a surplus of graduates.