Late Thursday night the Durham Board of Education ended the ongoing salary uncertainty faced by 1,875 essential support workers by choosing an option that decreases pay to 1,389 of those workers.
Thank you to Brian Calloway and Bull City Public Investigators for reporting in depth on this complicated issue that is a true emergency for almost 1,400 Durham school workers, students and parents. Whether readers agree with you or not, more public reporting on this crucial issue is 100% a good thing.
I would like to know if there's a bigger picture involving state budget cuts for public education. (Thank you, Republicans for working so hard to destroy public education). I'm sure it's not that our school board members are anti-school support staff. I've always thought highly of Natalie Beyer, for instance, and I believe her mission is to support our schools and school workers. I'd like to hear quotes from her or others explaining why they aren't voting to keep the October 2023 raises -- and why they wouldn't meet with the county commissioners. - Rah Bickley, Durham
Rah, this actually is a uniquely Durham problem. Funding wasn’t the core problem—it was budget mismanagement. No matter how many revenues DPS might have, if they can’t add columns in a spreadsheet, there are going to be massive problems like this.
There is going to be another follow-up to this story, and I even had already pulled some Natalie Beyer quotes that demonstrate how she went from expressing words in January as if she were a wage champion to workers to becoming a savvy fiscal hawk in February 2024. The majority of Board members took a staunchly conservative position that openly named budgets as being more important than their workers. I didn’t even do the workers justice in the way they expressed their outrage at the Board meeting. Many called out the lack of creativity and apparent lack of effort the Board made to find funds. DPS has reported it would cost $2.3 million to pay salaried workers out for the rest of the fiscal year. In a $620 million budget, that is like asking someone who makes $50,000 a year to come up with $185 but them saying they don’t have it while they simultaneously show you a savings account balance of $520.
Ultimately, I felt like the Board’s actions were the important thing to report and that should be remembered.
Thank you to Brian Calloway and Bull City Public Investigators for reporting in depth on this complicated issue that is a true emergency for almost 1,400 Durham school workers, students and parents. Whether readers agree with you or not, more public reporting on this crucial issue is 100% a good thing.
I would like to know if there's a bigger picture involving state budget cuts for public education. (Thank you, Republicans for working so hard to destroy public education). I'm sure it's not that our school board members are anti-school support staff. I've always thought highly of Natalie Beyer, for instance, and I believe her mission is to support our schools and school workers. I'd like to hear quotes from her or others explaining why they aren't voting to keep the October 2023 raises -- and why they wouldn't meet with the county commissioners. - Rah Bickley, Durham
Rah, this actually is a uniquely Durham problem. Funding wasn’t the core problem—it was budget mismanagement. No matter how many revenues DPS might have, if they can’t add columns in a spreadsheet, there are going to be massive problems like this.
There is going to be another follow-up to this story, and I even had already pulled some Natalie Beyer quotes that demonstrate how she went from expressing words in January as if she were a wage champion to workers to becoming a savvy fiscal hawk in February 2024. The majority of Board members took a staunchly conservative position that openly named budgets as being more important than their workers. I didn’t even do the workers justice in the way they expressed their outrage at the Board meeting. Many called out the lack of creativity and apparent lack of effort the Board made to find funds. DPS has reported it would cost $2.3 million to pay salaried workers out for the rest of the fiscal year. In a $620 million budget, that is like asking someone who makes $50,000 a year to come up with $185 but them saying they don’t have it while they simultaneously show you a savings account balance of $520.
Ultimately, I felt like the Board’s actions were the important thing to report and that should be remembered.