TOP 10 STORIES: County’s teaching assistants fight for job funding
Published 5:46 pm Tuesday, December 29, 2015
The uncertain fate of teaching assistant jobs in North Carolina due to the General Assembly’s inability to nail down a budget by July 1 is one of the Washington Daily News’ Top 10 stories of 2015.
During the summer months, state legislators were in opposition over how to fund teaching assistants. The House of Representatives proposed a budget that would maintain the previous year’s funding for assistants, but the Senate budget proposal slashed funding in half, in an effort to use the money to hire more teachers and eventually lower class sizes.
As a result, about 57 state-funded teaching assistants in the county were left unsure as to whether they would have a job this school year. Beaufort County school employees banded together to fight for those jobs, organizing meetings with Rep. Paul Tine and Sen. Bill Cook in August to voice their concerns.
“By taking teaching assistants out of the classroom, we’re really hurting the children,” said Jackie May, teaching assistant at Eastern Elementary School, in a previous interview. “These are the people who are going to be in charge of our country one day.”
“I think people think that we’re babysitting or just sitting around doing paperwork. We are actually instructing,” May said, adding that most assistants are college-educated.
In early August, with still no budget approval in sight, the Beaufort County Board of Education was forced to cut 16 assistant positions for the 2015-2016 school year. As some employees were moved to different schools and some positions were left unfilled, it added up to nine employees losing their jobs.
The school board had tried to maintain jobs in the face of state-level cuts for years, but according to Superintendent Don Phipps, the board could no longer afford to cover the costs.
The county’s Board of Commissioners then agreed to hear the plight of the school system at a special meeting on Aug. 17, and at the meeting, the commissioners voted to fund the nine employees who lost their jobs in the event that the state would decide to slash funding.
“I’m going to do all that’s in my power to see if we can save those jobs,” Commissioner Ed Booth said at the time. “We hate to do the work that the state’s supposed to be doing. … We just can’t sit around on our backside and wait on them.”
The General Assembly passed a months-overdue $21.735 billion budget in September that fully funded the teaching assistant positions for another year. Despite this, some Beaufort County schools still had to handle cuts in positions due to the way the assistants were allocated throughout the county.
While school officials are grateful that funding will continue for now, assistants are bracing themselves for the possibility of yet another fight over next year’s budget.
“I don’t know if you’ve spent a day in the classroom,” Eastern Elementary teaching assistant Robbins Rees said to Sen. Bill Cook during the August meeting. “We have children who have no resources. All they have is what we do.”
“We work really, really hard,” she said. “It’s our heart, it’s our calling, it’s our dedication.”