The greatest threat to our public schools in NC | Eastern North Carolina Now

One of the most dramatic changes impacting the public schools in our state, and in Beaufort County, is the loss of students.  With a few exceptions in the large urban areas of the state, the decline in students enrolling in the public schools is having a relatively unrecognized impact on the resources available for those students who remain in the public schools sector.  

The reason this impact is so significant is that each of those students lost means the amount of resources is less for those who remain, but the costs of educating those students does not drop proportionately with the decline in revenue.  The technical statement of the phenomenon is:  the decrease in marginal cost does not equal the decrease in marginal revenue.   And it is at the margin that the threat is most pronounced.  This would not be so significant if it was just one or two years, but the opposite has been true for several years.   The hit comes every year and now seems to be getting worse as state priorities have changed with increases in scholarships that have the effect of making it easier for more parents to pull their children out of the public schools and enroll them in non-public schools.  What kills the public schools is the cumulative impact of this decline in revenue while costs continue to increase, primarily as a result of increased salary costs in the public schools.  

The Raleigh News & Observer recent documented the shifting trends in the public/private school enrollments: Click here to go to the original source.

What the N&O story does not document is the impact these trends have on small school systems.  While larger systems can spread the impact over a larger population, thus ameliorating the impact on individual students, in small systems this is not as possible as in larger systems.

But beyond the cold hard facts of the difference in marginal costs and marginal revenue that impact the resources actually available, is the greatest threat:  The ignoring of the problem by school boards and school officials.  The game that is usually played is:  “Just give us more…” and they usually get more, but the difference between marginal revenue and marginal cost is greater than the relatively small increases allotted to the public schools.  Moreover, the burden of this problem falls heaviest on those public schools in “poorer” counties that have less ability to make up for the difference between marginal costs and marginal revenue.  Thus, the question becomes:  How long can we endure this inequity?  

Finally, to those who dismiss this threat to the economic wellbeing of our state by saying:  “more money is not going to solve the problem…” we would simply respond:  If not, why do so many people resist the reform in equity of how we fund public education?  Money makes a difference.  If it did not people would not mind losing it to others.