This first appeared in education reporter James Farrell's weekly education newsletter. Sign up here to get it to your inbox first.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools 2025-26 budget was adopted in a split vote last month. And if you’ve followed the news, you know one of the big points of debate was whether Mecklenburg County — facing expected revenue shortfalls this year — could afford to contribute more than the 5% increase in local teacher salary that the district is requesting.
There’s also another question: Should the county be contributing more, or should the burden of funding schools fall more on the state?
Let’s start with that first question: Can Mecklenburg County, which is being asked this year to contribute $667 million to CMS (around $28 million more than it did last year), afford to do more?
One study from the Public School Forum of North Carolina suggests yes. But Mecklenburg County officials tell me it’s more complicated.
First, a reminder of how CMS is funded. State funds account for nearly 56% of the district’s adopted $1.95 billion operating budget this year. That includes the vast majority of teacher compensation, with base salary and salary schedules decided in Raleigh. County funds account for around 34%. But that goes to some big things — including that local teacher salary supplement, which gives a local boost to teachers’ compensation.
(Federal funds account for around 6% — read more about that here).
The Public School Forum’s annual study of local school finance ranks Mecklenburg County pretty highly in terms of how much money it appropriates to education. (One caveat: Even though this study came out this year, it uses 2022-23 data.)
The study found Mecklenburg County appropriated roughly $3,963 per student, placing it at No. 7 in the state. Mecklenburg County is also often recognized for offering one of the highest teacher supplements in the state.
But the study argues that alone doesn’t say anything about the county’s “effort” — or as a percentage of its total available funding, how does it compare to other counties?
On that measurement, Mecklenburg County lags behind, at least according to the Public School Forum. The Forum’s study measures “Relative Funding Effort,” calculated by taking the local appropriations per student and dividing it by the county’s local revenue per student. The metric is supposed to tell us how much of a county’s potential spending power it is devoting to education. By this metric, the Public School Forum claims Mecklenburg County spent around 19.65% of its revenue-per-student on education — that would be good for 83rd highest out of 100 counties.
“While they’re locally contributing the seventh most in the state, they have a lot more revenue to work with and are spending a smaller percentage of that revenue than 82 other counties,” said Elizabeth Paul, policy and research manager at the Public School Forum. That might put more pressure on local governments to put more toward schools.
This was a data point that came up multiple times in the budget process in recent weeks.
Funding schools is primarily the state’s responsibility, per the state constitution. But Paul argued that it’s clear schools might be looking at less funding from the state, especially with impending tax cuts that some say will create revenue shortfalls.
“There’s going to be budget problems at the state level; that’s coming down the pipeline,” Paul said. “And so, even if it is the responsibility of the state here, what we’re seeing is that local governments will be forced to reckon with that.”
I reached out to the county to ask about this study, and to see if there really is room for more education spending. I received a pretty detailed response.
First, the county argued that numbers the study uses to calculate revenues doesn’t reflect the county’s actual revenues. For instance, the study uses the state’s average effective property tax rate to calculate county revenues — not the actual tax rates. The county says this results in an “artificially calculated tax revenue.”
(In the study itself, the authors argue they do this to demonstrate counties’ “actual ability to raise revenue” if they taxed up to the state average. That’s in keeping with the philosophy that the study is trying to measure the “effort” to fund schools.)
Still, the county argues that this, and other calculations, result in an inflated revenue that’s used to calculate that “funding effort” metric. The Mecklenburg County hypothetical revenue number used to calculate funding effort is listed in the study at around $2.8 billion — but the county’s entire budget for that fiscal year was $2.1 billion.
Here are some other things the county told me in its response:
- The county said the study “assumes all counties have the same needs for other services such as human services, parks, and public safety, but this is not the case.”
- The study doesn’t account for the capital costs of operating a district as large as CMS or county-funded education initiatives outside CMS — like the county’s pre-K program.
- A majority of the county’s property taxes goes to public schools: out of a tax rate of 48.31 cents, 21.66 goes to CMS operating, 11.57 goes to debts and capital (which includes schools) and 15.08 goes to funding the county’s own operations and other partners.
- Last, the county notes that since 2023, the year this data was taken, “the county has increased operating funding to schools by over $85 million.”
It all paints a complicated picture as the county prepares to shape its budget — and consider CMS’ funding request.
Still, Democrats and other public education advocates fear that the writing is on the wall: Local governments will be forced to bear more and more of the burden of funding education.
Speaking at last week’s legislative breakfast with the CMS School Board, Democratic U.S. Rep. Alma Adams said she worried about how the state would respond if President Donald Trump succeeded in shuttering the federal Department of Education and sent education “back to the states” as Trump has promised.
State Rep. Brandon Lofton, a Mecklenburg Democrat had this to say in response:
“There seems to be a growing belief in the leadership within the House and the Senate that they want to kick that responsibility not from the state, but down to the county level, and put more of that burden on property taxes.”
