Durham Association of Educators: Statement on April 24 Durham Public Schools Budget Vote

Image credit: Durham Association of Educators

Last night at the School Board meeting, we picketed at the Fuller Building together, delivered Board member report cards based on which of our priorities they support, and delivered powerful testimony in public comment. It was a proud display of our unity and growth as a union — bus drivers and monitors, media coordinators, cafeteria workers, IAs, EC teachers, parents and more, standing side by side.

Despite our union’s call for more transparency and a delay on the vote, the Board of Education unanimously voted to send the Superintendent’s budget request to the Board of County Commissioners with many crucial questions left unanswered. We still have not seen the district’s audit or learned what funds are available in the General Fund, but still the Board approved a budget request that calls for cutting over 100 teachers and other frontline staff, offers no local raises for classified staff, excludes interventionists and other positions from Master’s Pay, and excludes bus monitors from the newly proposed $200/month supplement for bus drivers. All this while also funding 101 directors and supervisors downtown— a number that far exceeds the number of Assistant Principals we have (86) and the number of directors the state allots Durham.

Simply put: this budget process was not transparent or collaborative enough and this budget request does not prioritize what students and frontline staff need most. That is extremely disappointing.

There are a few bright spots in the budget request that were a direct result of our organizing and are worth celebrating. It includes extending Master’s Pay to social workers, a $200/month supplement for bus driver supplement (a proposal our union leaders brought the district starting in December), and a certified supplement increase - three items that will make a real material difference in the lives of some workers and that were a part of our Spring 2025 priorities. All of our Spring 2025 Articles that we presented to Board members this month received a significant amount of attention in the discussion— it was encouraging to hear five Board members (Wendell Tabb, Joy Harrell Goff, Emily Chávez, Bettina Umstead, Jessica Carda-Auten) specifically lift up our public meetings and proposals. It wasn’t everything we wanted, and we still want to see more action on our priorities this Spring, but it was a sign of the progress we are making thanks to the union power we have worked so hard to build these past 18 months. We have been acting like a union and decision makers are learning to accept this.

While we did push the District to be more transparent than they originally intended, and we should celebrate our campaign efforts on that front, the timing of the release of this information made real transparency and collaboration impossible. Much of the crucial information about position cuts was not made clear until this week and some essential questions were still left unanswered. Repeatedly when Board members asked for key information, they received unclear and at times evasive answers from district administration. As with so many other important questions, when Board member Chávez asked administration what it would cost to include bus monitors in the transportation supplement, they could not or would not provide the answer. Administrators said they would need time to calculate the answer and it was too late to incorporate into this budget request even though it only requires knowing how many bus monitors work for the district— we estimate that it would only cost an additional $130-160k to include the 60-80 bus monitors in DPS, which is less than some downtown supervisors are paid.

When Board members asked how much it would cost to extend Master’s Pay to all who would have qualified in 2013 (and not just teachers and social workers), again administrators did not have an answer even though that figure has been requested repeatedly since last Spring. When Board member Tabb asked about the audit and the fund balance, it appeared that district administration had an idea of what funds were available, but chose not to disclose that information despite the impending vote.

While we understand that our new Superintendent and CFO inherited many of our glaring financial issues from previous administrations, that is not an excuse for the lack of answers that were provided to the public last night before the budget request was passed. After the classified pay debacle and this year’s budget mismanagement, we have learned our lesson once and for all that our students and staff simply cannot afford to blindly trust the decisions and priorities of a few administrators. For years under previous administrations, some of these same Board members and directors insisted to us that workers and community members need to sit back and let administration make all the decisions, and that lack of accountability is exactly what led to all these budget mismanagement issues we are all struggling to resolve now. We cannot repeat the same mistakes moving forward. Next year, we believe Meet & Confer negotiations will help us finally change the broken status quo in DPS, but in order to do that we need Board members who are willing to join us in championing transparency, accountability, and collaboration more than they did in this budget cycle. Our staff and students deserve a transformation of how DPS operates.

So what’s next? We will continue to do everything we can to demand answers about our finances and push to reallocate funds towards the things students need most. We also have several non-budgetary proposals in our Spring priorities that require urgent action from the bosses. Last night we invited Dr. Lewis and his team to another public meeting to discuss our Articles (many have already received majority approval from Board members, which you can see here in the report cards we unveiled last night) and modifying the Meet & Confer policy. Protecting students and families from ICE, personal days and inclement weather days for classified staff, printed contracts, and a collective grievance policy are just some of the proposals we hope to finalize collaboratively with the superintendent and his team so that we can end the year on a high-note together. We sent him multiple options for meeting times in mid-May and will update everyone when he RSVPs.

In the bigger picture: we have to keep growing our union and inspiring our coworkers across the state. Next year we will have Meet & Confer sessions starting in the Fall, which will put us in a stronger position than ever in district decision making, but we know we’ll need supermajority worker unity to have our voice heard. We’ll also lead our new coalition Durham Rising to demand Duke pay its fair share and more. Next Spring we’ll also have the opportunity to elect a new School Board and we need to channel all our political muscle into making sure we elect leaders we can count on to put students and workers first and hold the administration accountable. And as always, our statewide union must keep leading the fight to beat the privatizers in the General Assembly so that we can finally win all the resources we need. Onwards!

This statement was first published by the Durham Association of Educators.

Image credit: Durham Association of Educators