North Carolina
Red state? Blue state? North Carolina's choice in 2024
 |
In 2023, the Republican-led legislature passed legislation that will expand school choice statewide. In response, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper issued a state of emergency for our public schools.
Here is a look at the events and the issues that will play a key role in determining the future of public education in North Carolina this year.
Events to watch in 2024
Rollout of school choice expansion
New applications for Opportunity Scholarships, or private school vouchers, will be open from Feb. 1 to March 1, according to the N.C. State Education Assistance Authority, which administers the program.
Things to note from their website:
- Parents started creating accounts as early as December 2023. Here is the application process.
- There is a webinar to learn more on Jan. 5 at noon. Register here.
- Parents of any North Carolina student entering kindergarten through 12th grade may apply.
- Scholarships range from $3,246 to $7,213 and are based on a family’s household income.
- Scholarships can be used to pay the required tuition and fees to attend an eligible private school.
- In early April, families who apply will get an award offer or waitlist notification.
Leandro hearing
On Feb. 22, the almost 40-year-old Leandro lawsuit will be heard in the North Carolina Supreme Court. The decision to rehear the case was split along party lines.
The case is commonly called “Leandro” because of the name of the lead plaintiff, but Republican justices have instead labeled the case “Hoke County,” according to the Carolina Journal.
The 2024 elections
On March 5, primary elections will be held statewide. You should expect campaigning for the general election, which is on Nov. 5, to begin in earnest the next day. Here is more information on the 2024 elections in North Carolina from the N.C. State Board of Elections.
In addition to local and federal races, EdNC will be covering the statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor (who sits on the N.C. State Board of Education and the N.C. State Board of Community Colleges), superintendent for public instruction, attorney general, and treasurer.
As of Dec.30, 2023, there were 2,701,215 North Carolina voters registered as unaffiliated; 2,414,169 registered Democrats; and 2,220,459 registered Republicans.
The short session of the N.C. General Assembly
The short session is scheduled to convene on April 24 at noon.
You can see the full list of bills that can be taken up in the short session here, but generally legislators revisit the budget, take up bills that met the crossover deadline, and consider recommendations from study commissions.
The end of child care stabilization funding
Federal child care stabilization funding ends on June 30, and EdNC is tracking closures.
Federal funding cliff for public schools
During the pandemic, the federal government issued three tranches of funding totaling $190 billion for school districts. The last round of funding must be committed by Sept. 30. Districts can request 18-month extensions on spending the funds and even longer in extraordinary circumstances, but most have not done so.
The loss of federal funding that’s being used to pay educators has researchers nationwide concerned.
Issues to watch in 2024
The implications of school choice for public schools
The state budget authorized up to $1 million for Parents for Education Freedom in North Carolina to provide outreach, scholarship education, and application assistance for parents and students, which may raise awareness of school choice statewide.
In this first year of the expansion of school choice, our research anticipates there will be hot spots where this policy change is more acutely felt by public schools. In smaller districts, losing even a handful of students makes a difference.
Those hot spots are likely to be influenced by many factors, including:
- How competitive the district choices are with educational choices in other sectors;
- Where there is existing private school capacity at a price point that the voucher would make a difference;
- Where schools with charters that were revoked reorganize as private schools;
- The establishment of private online schools;
- Where churches set up private schools;
- Where homeschooling parents set up private schools;
- Where there is existing or expanding charter school capacity; and
- Trends in population growth.
Here are the requirements to set up a private school in North Carolina. Note there is no minimum number of students. Once set up, the private school must submit a new school signup request with NCSEAA.
Some public school districts may be able to smooth the initial impact on the number of students served and their budgets, if they can:
- More effectively tell their story and all of the ways they serve students and communities;
- Leverage their fund balances, which operate like savings accounts;
- Increase the support of their school foundations and other local philanthropy;
- And secure more local funding, which will depend on the strength of their local tax base and the willingness of their county commissions.
Here is our most recent analysis of fund balances. Some districts are showing signs of financial distress already.
We anticipate school districts will be notified in April of how many students received a voucher so that they can prepare their budgets for the 2024-25 year to present to county commissions in May and start working on their master schedules. Depending on the impact, issues such as strategic staffing, equitable rostering, change management, and even school closure may bubble up in the spring.
Longer term, as school choice expansion is implemented and the impact on current and future market share across districts is better understood, expect there to be conversations about pluralism. The concept is not new but is more prevalent abroad — it is seen by some researchers and advocates “as a middle path between the libertarian approach that advocates unfettered choice and the state-oriented approach.”
According to the Johns Hopkins School of Education, “Educational pluralism is a structure for public education in which the government funds and regulates a wide range of schools equally,” and all the types of schools “are held to the same set of high academic standards regardless of their model.”
Federal funding
With Republican candidates talking on the campaign trail about closing the U.S. Department of Education and converting federal funding to block grants for school choice, there is a lot at stake for public schools just in the 2024 federal elections.
Tennessee recently had a discussion about opting out of federal funding that is worth watching.
Possible growth in the number of charter schools
Many are worried that the shift from the Charter School Advisory Board to the Charter School Review Board will open the flood gates on charter approvals. North Carolina started its charter experiment in 1996 with a cap of 100 on charter schools. After the cap was lifted in 2011, the advisory board and the N.C. State Board of Education have kept growth steady with 209 charter schools now operating statewide and just 54 closures.
Implications of other policy changes from the long session
Graduation in three years
The state budget requires the N.C. State Board of Education to create a three-year graduation track for high school students.
Students who opt for that track — and who also seek a degree, diploma, or certificate at an eligible postsecondary institution — will be eligible for “early graduate scholarships” based on financial need.
This week, the N.C. State Board of Education will take this up. Here is the proposed rule.
There are about 100,000 school seniors across North Carolina in a given school year. We are watching the potential loss of average daily membership for seniors in school districts.
Funding in arrears
There is a provision in the budget instructing the N.C. Department of Public Instruction to develop a funding in arrears model, which means public school funding would be based on the actual average daily membership from the prior school year, instead of projections for the upcoming school year.
Under the proposal, DPI would have to distribute funding in arrears starting with the 2024-25 school year.
“The Department shall provide funds from the ADM Contingency Reserve to fund public school units whose actual ADM for the current school year is higher than the actual ADM from the prior school year,” the budget also says.
This week, the N.C. State Board of Education will take this up, too. Here is the presentation, and here is the report.
With more students availing themselves of Opportunity Scholarships, it is not clear with regards to funding what happens if those students come back to a public school after the start of the academic year.
Clarification on the savings provision
Starting in the 2025-26 school year, the budget says “it is the intent of the General Assembly to reinvest in the public schools any savings realized by the State each year” when a student accepts a scholarship “that is less than 100% of the average State per pupil allocation for average daily membership for a student in a public school unit.”
Notably, there is no reinvestment for the 2024-25 school year — the first year of expansion — and there is no language explaining where this fund would be held and how it would be managed.
Policy changes that could re-resurface in the short session and beyond
The state budget — and who received special appropriations
The total state budget for 2023-24 is $30 billion, with $17.3 billion for education, and of that, $11.5 billion for public education.
Included in the state budget were 943 special provisions, totaling $1.2 billion, including $61.5 million for athletic facilities for school districts.
We expect additional special appropriations in the short session.
Teacher pay
South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas all passed historic teacher raises in their most recent budgets.
In North Carolina, base salary raises ranged from 3.6 to 10.8% over the biennium. Beginning teacher pay is set to increase from $37,000 to $41,000 over the next two years. But the increase for teachers with 15 years or more of experience is a 3.6% raise over the biennium, or about $188 per month, before taxes.
Depending on the teacher turnover numbers in March, advocates may push again for North Carolina to pay educators a family-sustaining living wage.
Personal Education Savings Accounts
In 2023, House Bill 420, titled “Expand & Consolidate K-12 Scholarships,” was introduced and would have expanded the Personal Education Savings Accounts program (PESA) in North Carolina to include all students, eventually consolidating PESA with the Opportunity Scholarship program.
Both of these programs provide public money to students to use at non-public schools.
In 2024-25, the bill would have expanded PESA from being a program for students with disabilities to being open for everyone. And then, in 2026-27, the Opportunity Scholarship program and PESA would have merged.
Expect to see this idea surface again.
Called “super-vouchers,” a 2024 look ahead published by Brookings said this could be the “biggest policy change in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Education — and likely to reverse Brown’s influence in several ways.”
Changing the way public schools are funded
A change in how we fund schools has also been proposed, which would move us from allotments to a weighted student funding formula. The big question would be whether the baseline investment in each student is adequate. Read more about the proposed change here.
Back in 2009, the legislature commissioned an evaluation of North Carolina’s school finance system by Denver-based consulting firm Augenblick, Palaich, and Associates (APA). A final report was submitted to lawmakers in September 2010, entitled “Recommendations to strengthen North Carolina’s school funding system.” While there was bipartisan support for pursuing school finance reform at the time, it was put on hold because of the Great Recession.
Five years later, after the recession abated, the legislature asked the now defunct Program Evaluation Division to prepare this report. Hold on for the name of the report: “Allotment-specific and system-level issues adversely affect North Carolina’s distribution of K-12 resources.”
A legislative commission was convened in 2017 to take up the recommendations and the reports. It seemed like legislation might be taken up, and then COVID happened.
Here is WestEd’s 2019 study on the cost adequacy, distribution, and alignment of funding for North Carolina’s K–12 public education system.
RTI submitted this report to the legislature on weighted student funding for exceptional children in August 2022. This week, the N.C. State Board of Education will take this issue up as well. Here is the report being considered by the board ahead of submitting it to the legislature.
Among many other considerations, we will be watching how these policy conversations unfold with regards to the prevalence and importance of dual enrollment opportunities for students statewide.
What can you do?
The cumulative effect of these policy changes post-pandemic are cause for concern, and advocates and educators for public schools would argue they are cause for alarm.
Take a look at our considerations for policymakers, superintendents, and philanthropists, as well as parents, educators, and advocates.
North Carolina loves its number one ranking as the top state for business. Corporations have historically played an important role in supporting public education in North Carolina. We are watching whether corporations and business advocacy organizations begin to speak with one voice on some of these key policy changes.
We believe in the power of the “go and see.” Invite your policymakers and other stakeholders to visit your child’s classroom and school with you.
Read EdNC. Sign up for our newsletters. When you share our articles, you extend our reach. Prompt the change you want to see.
What can EdNC do?
The EdNC team is uniquely positioned to document the impact of the expansion of school choice on all 115 school districts, all 58 community colleges, and all 100 counties in 2024 and beyond.
We believe there is power in being able to tell the story and collectively writing the history of what is happening to in our schools and communities from Murphy to Manteo.
Thank you for being part of EdNC’s architecture of participation. 2024 will matter.
North Carolina
The Real Reason North Carolina’s GOP Is Proposing the Most Radical Anti-Abortion Bill Yet
Another anti-abortion abolitionist proposal has been in the news. This time, conservative lawmakers in North Carolina have asked voters to approve a state constitutional amendment recognizing the personhood of embryos and establishing that anyone who ends an embryonic life is guilty of first-degree murder. Those penalties might also apply to people pursuing in vitro fertilization or using some contraceptives, given that abortion foes sometimes view either as requiring the taking of unborn life. And that’s the most ordinary part of the proposal: The bill also provides that private individuals have a right to use deadly force to prevent “the willful destruction of life.” House Bill 1232 isn’t clear about exactly who could exercise this constitutional right to vigilante violence. Would it just be available to those seeking to kill abortion providers and patients? Or might it apply even more broadly to those seen to aid them?
The bill has been greeted with bafflement and disbelief. One of its co-sponsors was embarrassed enough to remove his name from the proposal. But the idea of licensing private violence did not come out of thin air. There have been decades of debate about the use of force within the anti-abortion movement. And as conservatives embrace an increasingly punitive agenda, old justifications for violence have reemerged.
Since the 1960s, abortion foes have rallied around the idea that constitutional rights begin the moment an egg is fertilized. That meant that liberal abortion laws would violate the federal Constitution. Because that claim didn’t gain traction in the federal courts, abortion opponents didn’t have to settle what it would mean in practice to enforce this idea of personhood. Did it require that abortion be punished as murder, or that women be punished? Might it instead require more support for women during pregnancy?
By the 1980s, as the anti-abortion movement aligned with the Republican Party, the movement’s leaders increasingly retooled their ideas of justice for the unborn to fit the GOP’s tough-on-crime agenda. They endorsed fetal homicide laws and backed prosecutions based on conduct during pregnancy. But these moves didn’t lead to the reversal of Roe, much less a decline in the abortion rate.
Frustration led to a wave of lawbreaking. Operation Rescue, a clinic blockade group, invited supporters to use civil disobedience and break the law if necessary to stop people from entering abortion clinics. Operation Rescue disrupted the Democratic National Convention in 1992 and recorded thousands of arrests. Blockaders even developed a legal argument to justify their actions, drawing on the common law defense of necessity, which allows someone to break a law to achieve a greater moral good.
Some advocates went further. If abortion really were the murder of an equal person, they asked, why wasn’t it justified to use deadly force to protect that equal person?
Prominent figures in the late 1980s and early 1990s elaborated on that argument in books and talk-show appearances. The claim justified kidnappings, firebombings, and a series of murders of doctors, clinic staff, and security. Powerful anti-abortion groups denounced the violence, but the question of deadly force struck others as surprisingly complex. If a fertilized egg was an equal person, and if the way to protect that person involved violence, why was deadly force off limits?
While violence against abortion clinics and providers never went away, it receded from the peak of the 1980s and early 1990s. The federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which heightened penalties for threats, violence, and obstruction of people entering facilities, radically undercut the clinic blockade movement when Congress passed it in 1994. So did the conviction of high-profile murder defendants like Michael Griffin and Paul Hill. The clinic blockade movement was consumed by internal divides, with multiple organizations even claiming the name Operation Rescue. Anti-abortion leaders mostly focused on change through the courts and politics.
Now that Roe is gone, the movement is at an inflection point. Personhood has become the movement’s new North Star. And while success in the federal courts isn’t imminent, there is now no reason a state couldn’t enforce any vision of personhood. That means that conservatives have to decide what they mean by enforcing the rights of the unborn. This bill is a sign that even punishing women doesn’t strike some as harsh enough.
This bill won’t pass. For starters, North Carolina is not the most likely state to pass any abortion abolitionist bill; at the moment, it doesn’t even ban abortion from the moment of fertilization. And no state has yet passed any kind of abolitionist proposal, much less one allowing people to gun one another down in the name of protecting life.
But this bill has a different resonance now that Donald Trump has pledged not to enforce the FACE Act in the abortion context except in the most extreme circumstances. It is also a reminder of how the Overton window on personhood is shifting. Abolitionists who call for the punishment of women are gaining influence in state legislatures and movement debates. They have developed their own incremental approach: In South Carolina, for example, Richard Cash, a powerful lawmaker, tried this session to advance a bill punishing women for abortion, but only for a misdemeanor, rather than a felony. The bill became the second abolitionist proposal to pass through a committee this spring before time ran out to pass it this session.
Leading anti-abortion groups still speak out against abolitionists, but their strategy is clear: normalizing the idea of punishing women. The more extreme proposals conservatives advance, the more previously unthinkable ideas become politically realistic.
With one exception, Democrats have lost every single U.S. Senate race in North Carolina this century, their quests in recent years rocked by controversy and difficult political climates. This year, they are betting two things will make it different: The candidate is Roy Cooper, the southern state’s former governor, and the economy, where voter anger could imperil the party in power.
Months out from Election Day, Cooper’s Senate campaign is centering his message on economic anxiety. In his first television ad of the cycle — details of which were first reported by MS NOW — Cooper weaves his personal story with the kitchen-table concerns preoccupying voters.
“I’m running for the Senate to make life easier today,” Cooper says in the spot, which his campaign says is part of a seven-figure ad buy. “To go after insurance companies ripping you off. To make sure you can retire with dignity. And to build an economy that finally values working people.”
The North Carolina race is primed to be one of the most important contests of this fall’s midterms as he attempts to flip control of one of North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seats for the first time since 2008. The recruitment of Cooper — a two-term governor who was elected both times while Trump carried the state in the same election cycle — has buoyed the party’s hopes.
This is also a contest in which Trump’s influence is clearly a factor. The president has thrown his support behind former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, pitting a candidate with deep ties to Trump against Cooper, who has long demonstrated an ability to win in the state despite national political headwinds.
SHELBY, N.C. — A former North Carolina police officer caught on a doorbell camera repeatedly punching a woman in the face was charged Monday with assault.
The video of Shelby Officer Karson Hyder pummeling Cherrie Moore on Friday has circulated widely on social media.
Hyder, 22, turned himself in to the Cleveland County Detention Center Monday morning and was released on a $10,000 secured bond. Court records do not list an attorney for him, and a phone number associated with his name was out of service.
Hyder, who was suspended Friday and fired on Saturday, was responding to a breaking-and-entering call when the scuffle ensued.
According to a warrant, Moore, 34, fled the residence on foot and resisted arrest, assaulting Hyder by “grabbing and ripping (his) uniform.”
A separate warrant filed Monday alleged Hyder “unlawfully and willfully did assault and strike Cherrie Moore” by grabbing Moore “by the arm, pushing her to the ground and striking her in the face with a closed fist, thereby inflicting serious injury possible broken nose and busted lip.”
The State Bureau of Investigation had announced Saturday it had opened an investigation into Hyder.
Moore was initially charged with breaking and entering, resisting arrest and assault on a public officer, but the latter two charges have since been dismissed. She was freed on an unsecured bond. A phone number associated with Moore was disconnected.
Her attorney, Ronald Haynes, told The Associated Press in an email that Moore “is recovering and receiving treatment for her mental health.”
“The heinous actions of former Officer Karson Hyder will forever negatively impact Ms. Cherrie Moore and her family,” Haynes continued. “It’s a small relief that city officials responded so promptly to terminate and charge Mr. Hyder.”
Copyright © 2026 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
-
Virginia5 minutes agoVirginia Lottery Mega Millions, Pick 3 Night results for June 2, 2026
-
Wisconsin15 minutes agoWisconsin Lottery Mega Millions, Pick 3 results for June 2, 2026
-
West Virginia20 minutes agoWest Virginia Virtual Academy celebrates second graduating class
-
Wyoming27 minutes agoWyoming mountain bike hotspot Curt Gowdy wants to know how it can improve
-
Crypto30 minutes agoBinance Research Links Bitcoin Weakness to Record S&P 500 Capital Inflow
-
Finance35 minutes agoProximo Congress 2026: US Energy & Infrastructure Finance | Insights | Mayer Brown
-
Fitness42 minutes ago
As cost of living bites, one of the things slipping may be fitness goals
-
Movie Reviews50 minutes agoMasters of the Universe (2026) | Movie Review | Deep Focus Review
