By Francis Koster, Ed.D.

There is no requirement that North Carolina K-12 schools be routinely tested for lead in drinking water, radon gas, or air quality issues like high CO2, high particulate matter and undesirable chemicals. Around half of all schools in North Carolina have these invisible issues that lower learning at least one letter grade for all their students.

Because of actions by our elected officials, North Carolina is one of a minority of states that does not fund building construction and maintenance of all school districts equally. This is doing great damage to a lot of our kids.

Since 2016, our sister organization not-for-profit organization, The Pollution Detectives Inc. has placed, for free, various kinds of monitors in more than 850 locations in North Carolina to assisted courageous educational and healthcare leaders “make the invisible visible.” Around half of these surveys reveal conditions that hurt learning directly.

But there is hope — scientific research indicates that when school systems with older buildings fix the issues identified by our monitors, student learning and health improves considerably.

If your school leadership followed these role-model leaders, it would accelerate student learning, raise your school system’s statewide rank, and increase property values in your community. Costs associated with absenteeism among teachers and students would also decrease, making room for more staff or higher pay. 

In spite of this track record, when we offer to lend our expensive and sophisticated monitors to educational leaders, the vast majority of them politely decline. 

Why? 

It has become clearer to us that these professionals face a moral dilemma with no easy solution.

There seem to be two scenarios:

1) School leaders decline our help to examine their facilities (for free) because they know that they are already doing everything they can with the funding they have. Without the funding, they are powerless to fix classroom conditions that slow learning. When word gets out that a problem exists, parents are angry that school leadership is not protecting their children and the reputation and livelihood of local leaders is at risk.

2) School leaders could use the monitors we confidentially lend to survey indoor environmental issues, and when they are found, they make that risk known. However, they do not have the resources to fix these issues. Again, parents become angry, and again, the reputation and employment of local leaders is at risk.

In both of these scenarios, the root cause of risk to local educational leaders is a state legislature that persistently underfunds school building construction and maintenance.

Equitable funding for capital improvements would take a lot of this moral dilemma away and be much fairer to students. 

In 2020-21, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction did a survey of how much money was needed to fix, rebuild or build new public schools. That now 4-year-old study estimated that the capital needs of North Carolina schools was around $13 billion.

The “Educational Lottery” is often cited as a major step forward by the politicians. Last year was the largest amount in history — but those lottery funds amount allocated for repairing schools is less than one-fifth of what the Department of Public Instruction says they need every year.

The Legislature says that the state cannot afford more.

And while they are only funding one-fifth of the needed amount, the same elected officials put in place a law that cuts state taxes for corporations operating in North Carolina from 7.5 percent in 1997 to 2.5 percent in 2019. And current legislation calls for it to continue to drop every year until 2030, when it brings the corporate tax rate to zero — a loss of $2 billion in annual state income.

During the same time period, the average individual tax rate for your household remains at 5.25 percent.

The state could catch up on all money needed to repair our schools in just a few years by restoring state income tax on for-profit corporations to the same percentage as individuals.

So, the bottom line is that while the state Department of Public Instruction says we need roughly $13 billion over 5 years to fix issues that lower student learning in half our schools, the politicians are investing only a small portion of that.

By changing our decades-long, dysfunctional, statewide school building funding policy and practices, North Carolina can significantly improve the lives and futures of our 1.3 million K-12 students. 

But it will not happen unless we make this issue a topic of public discussion. Will you? And make your kids and grandkids proud of you?

Francis Koster lives in Kannapolis.