NC lawmakers challenged to sign pledge to save school art, music and PE programs

A parents group is calling on state lawmakers to sign a pledge to fund arts and physical education teachers so they’re not eliminated when sharply lower class sizes for kindergarten through third-grade go into effect in 2018.

School districts around North Carolina have warned they might have to lay off thousands of art, music and PE teachers in 2018 to help pay for new K-3 classroom teachers when class sizes drop from a maximum of 24 students to 19 to 21 children.

Save Our Schools announced Monday the creation of the “North Carolina Education Pledge” in which the parent group will ask every state legislator to support funding to hire a minimum of four additional classroom teachers for every elementary school. As an alternative, the group will ask lawmakers to pledge funding one specialist for every six classroom teachers allotted.

As part of a one-year reprieve for implementing the smaller class sizes, state legislative leaders said they intended to fund the “enhancement teachers” in 2018.

Save Our Schools says the pledge is necessary because state lawmakers “failed to restore any funding for specialists in the budget that will be in effect for the 2018-2019 school year.” The budget recently adopted by state lawmakers includes no mention of their intention to fund arts and PE teachers in 2018.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Leader Phil Berger said Monday she believed the omission of the wording on enhancement teachers was inadvertent and would likely be fixed by a technical correction to the budget.

Volunteers from Save Our Schools will hand deliver copies of the pledge, which can be found at ncedpledge.org, to state lawmakers on Monday.

“Over and over again, our members have been told by their legislators that they would like to help, but they do not have the power to do so, because they feel like they lack the power to convince leadership to take action,” Renee Sekel, a Cary mother of three and founder of Save Our Schools, said in a written statement. “And the leadership continues to make excuses for its failures; this time pretending that it needs yet more information from schools before it can provide any funding at all for Specials.”

This story was originally published June 26, 2017 at 1:31 PM with the headline "NC lawmakers challenged to sign pledge to save school art, music and PE programs."