Superintendent Mark Johnson (left) and Bill Cobey (right)
Details may not be public yet, but North Carolina K-12 leaders on the State Board of Education will look to pass down $3.2 million in General Assembly-ordered budget calls in a special meeting Tuesday morning.
As reported by Policy Watch last week, the legislative spending cuts for the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) are likely to impact personnel in the state agency and its services for poor and rural districts across the state.
This year’s $3.2 million cut is part of a two-year reduction for the state’s top education bureaucracy, which has been under withering scrutiny from Republican legislators in recent years. The agency had already weathered roughly $20 million in funding reductions since 2009.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to like the cuts we make, because they’ll have to be in the area of services to the districts,” State Board of Education Chairman Bill Cobey said last week.
DPI Superintendent Mark Johnson, a Republican elected last year, has been silent about the cuts thus far, although Cobey said the superintendent has shared multiple proposals for dishing out the cuts.
Cobey noted the daily changes to those proposals last week.
Board members are expected to vote on the cuts Tuesday. But a DPI official, citing the confidentiality of personnel information, said details on the cuts won’t be available to the public and the media until after Tuesday’s meeting.
Watch for Policy Watch coverage of the cuts this week.
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