By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

A member of the Lee County Board of Commissioners has said she hopes the olive branch it has extended to the county’s school board to settle their differences will be accepted.

Republican Commissioner Taylor Vorbeck spoke at length toward the end of the commissioners’ meeting on February 3 and called for an end to the struggle between the two elected bodies over the issue of education funding that has gone on for the past four years.

The conflict between the boards has taken several different forms during its lifetime, but most recently in a game of political tennis where the school system’s 600-plus classified employees have been batted back and forth between the two since last November in a finger-pointing contest over who is to blame for low salaries and benefits for non-certified employees that the county’s 17 campuses simply could not operate without.

This employee grouping includes bus drivers and cafeteria workers, teacher assistants and office staff, library workers and others who are not required to obtain a license or certificate in order to be employed. Many of the school district’s classified workers are long-term employees who have been with the system for decades.

They began organizing to push not just for better wages, but also for a share of earned vacation and sick time, and for the right to participate in the TA to Teachers program, providing opportunities for employees to work toward a bachelor’s degree that could one day qualify them to become teachers in their own right, among other demands.

Vorbeck seeks to clear the air

Vorbeck, who was first elected in 2022, waited until near the end of the February 3 meeting to attempt to clear the air on several issues where she believes misunderstandings and misstatements of facts have led the matter of the classified employees salary and benefits to reach the point where it is today.

“Some of the biggest issues I believe causing the back and forth are when statements are made, and they are either not vetted or they are repeated without going to the source. Opinions are not fact,” she said. “How you think something should happen is still not fact, repeating something you heard without knowing if it is a fact does not make it a fact.”

That circumstance only gets improved, she suggests, when “we all hold ourselves a little more accountable when it comes to fact-checking” the things leaders say and repeat.

An example of where being sure of facts might improve the dialogue back and forth, and actually move the discussion forward, centers around claims being made about using some of the county’s fund balance, an account made up of unspent funds at the end of each fiscal year that each of the 100 counties in the state are allowed to use at their discretion. Fund balance spending most often goes toward major construction projects, short-term relief during economic downturns, or in times of disaster.

Vorbeck likened the county’s annual budget to that of an average family, where known expenditures are planned, and some money is set aside regularly for future needs. It doesn’t make sense then, she said, to pay for something like salaries out of those reserve funds year after year, knowing those dollars were intended to cover only one-time costs.

“Using savings to pay monthly expense is terrible money management,” she said.

No pay increase is a myth

Perhaps the most oft-repeated claim made over the past three months is that classified staff members have not seen an increase in their pay in almost 16 years. Vorbeck maintained that this is a misconception. She said to those attending the commissioners meeting that during the Great Recession of 2008, it was the pay scale for classified employees, not pay increases, that was frozen as part of a nationwide effort to head off what could have been the country’s worst financial disaster ever.

The Rant inquired further about this issue to the Lee County Schools district office and received similar information in the form of a statement.

“District leadership and the Board of Education continually discuss ways to better retain and attract employees. Through these discussions in 2023, it became clear that classified employees pay needed attention,” the statement read. “To address this, the Board initiated a salary study to gather accurate data for future budget requests to the county commissioners, which was the top request submitted last year. Since 2008, our classified staff have been paid at or above the minimum required by the state of North Carolina. While the local board did freeze the local salary schedule in 2008, classified employees have continued to receive base increases in alignment with state raises.”

The district also said it made classified pay increases their top priority in the FY 2024-25 budget and is likely to do so again this year.

Vorbeck believes it is important for everyone to remember that the county’s public school system is the only one of its 21 departments “that we can’t control where the money goes.”

She spoke of the funding earned by the system based on its average membership, or ADM, number (a calculation that floats up and down with each day of the school year) and which state law says that while counties must fund their system of public schools, they have no say when it comes to determining how those dollars are spent.

“We know that the school system needs more money. That’s across all counties in all states,” she said. “But if we were to fully fund their requests from just Fiscal Year 2023-24, we (would) have had to choose to put less in the budgets for other county departments – the sheriff, social services, parks and recreation, senior services, or COLTS. I’m not saying that one is better than the other. It’s just not as black and white as everyone likes to believe.”

Can there be a way forward?

Vorbeck’s remarks offered some of the clearest statements yet of the issues not only for the classified school employees who have sought their help in advocating for their issues, but in a much bigger way, of those between the commissioners and the school board since 2021.

During those four years, the school board has gone time and time again to the commissioners with expansion budget requests to address what it has viewed as mission critical needs that must be met, and in each of those four years, the commissioners have voted down – unanimously – those requests, choosing instead to grant the school board a lesser amount of unrestricted funds, with which they could spend as they saw fit.

But it’s a pattern that Vorbeck is determined to break.

“This continued fight back and forth is tiring. It’s clearly getting us nowhere and as it continues, it only diminishes the efforts that our certified and classified staff are doing on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “I’d like to say that in efforts by the Board of Commissioners in unanimously funding the Jonesboro School’s demolition project, as well as the foundation for the bleachers at Lee County Senior High, that we as commissioners are extending an olive branch to the Board of Education, that we are doing the right things when it comes to what we are funding. With this olive branch, I would like to ask the school board to take a step toward trusting us, and we will take another step toward trusting you. We can’t change what took place with boards of the past, but what we can do is to take ownership of what has occurred and stop using it as an excuse, but turn it instead into fuel to do better.”

Budget season is already underway. Requests are now being made within each of the 21 departments under the funding umbrella of Lee County government, with a plan for County Manager Lisa Minter to present a first draft of her recommendations to commissioners in May. The school board is aiming to be the first of those to submit its request for the 2025-26 fiscal year, and that could happen by the time schools let out for spring break in mid-March.