NC Teachers are fed up
North Carolina, a right-to- work state, doesn’t have teachers unions, but as teachers return to their classrooms this month they’ve never been more united.
In their recent session, lawmakers did nothing to lift North Carolina’s teachers from near the bottom of national pay rankings. They also cut funding for thousands of teacher assistants, allowed class sizes to grow and took away teachers’ basic protection against dismissal without reasonable cause.
Complaints about pay or being taken for granted are hardly new for teachers here or virtually anywhere in the nation. But the extent of those complaints among North Carolina’s more than 95,000 public school teachers feels broader than ever. Two weeks ago, a final Moral Monday demonstration in Raleigh was centered on teacher issues and drew a massive crowd. At a western version of Moral Monday in Asheville last Monday more than 5,000 protesters turned out.
June Atkinson, the state’s superintendent of public instruction and a former teacher, said recently, “I am truly worried about the ongoing starvation of our public schools. I see other states making a commitment to public education. In our state I see in this budget we’re cutting teachers, we’re cutting teacher assistants, we’re cutting instructional support.”
What makes this neglect especially galling is that some Republican lawmakers deny it’s