“Our public school system is not OK, our students are not OK, our educators are not OK,” said Jennilee Lloyd on why she was protesting near a Morrisville intersection on a Wednesday morning, even though she’d prefer to be in her classroom teaching. Teachers from more than 50 North Carolina schools staged a “walkout” Wednesday to draw attention to issues facing school funding and teacher pay in the state. It’s the first in a series of planned protests over the months until lawmakers return for the start of a new legislative session in April.
A few miles down the road from where Lloyd stood, Mills Park Elementary School teachers gathered at a Cary intersection with signs and matching t-shirts that read, “Today’s lesson: Standing up for yourself.” Drivers honked in support and runners breathlessly thanked them for the demonstration.
Seemingly every homemade sign named a different grievance — the lack of a state budget, elimination of master’s pay, rising health care premiums, frozen step increases.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ Daily, Weekend and Election 2026 newsletters.]
Caitlin Dowell, a second grade teacher at Mills Park, was nearly finished obtaining her master’s degree when she moved to North Carolina from New York in 2016. Her new coworkers were the ones to inform her that just three years before, North Carolina eliminated its master’s pay program which rewarded teachers who obtained the advanced degree with a salary increase.
While Wake County and a few other districts, primarily in the Triangle, offer locally funded master’s pay today, it’s far from the statewide guarantee eliminated 13 years ago. That was Dowell’s first red flag that teacher benefits were headed in a disappointing direction.
Years later, the state rolled back health benefits for retirees for those hired after Jan. 1, 2021 — an example of the progressively worsening state of things, Dowell said. These changes to teachers’ benefits combined with already low pay stack up to create a profession that Dowell wonders why anyone would willingly choose to go into going forward.
“For me, when you go into a public servant position like teaching, your salaries are low, but the good thing is you’re kind of taken care of by the state afterwards,” she said.
“To be able to have health benefits when you retire is a huge benefit, which is why people go into the profession. So when you take that away, there’s gonna be no one that wants to go into teaching. You get paid so little and you’e not getting anything additional. Who’s gonna sign up for that?”
Teachers as well as other state employees are now facing rising health care costs as the State Health Plan’s budget deficit prompted increases on out-of-pocket costs for the state’s employees. Now, Dowell is looking at a health care premium nearly triple what she once paid.
“All of these costs are increasing to live here, but our salaries are not keeping up with that,” she said.
North Carolina remains the only state in the country without a budget a week into 2026 as lawmakers continue to butt heads. The stalemate leaves a lot of factors up in the air, just one of them being wage increases for teachers. An initial proposal of the budget from the House last May actually restored master’s pay and offered higher starting salaries — although the Senate’s proposal diverged.
But the fate of any proposal is unclear as the state exceeds six months without a resolution. The inability to come to a consensus on these key issues for educators is sad, Dowell said.
“Even within the General Assembly you have this divide of how we should be treating teachers,” Dowell said.
“And this is the same party (controlling the House and Senate), so even if you take politics out of it, this is just two sides that are not agreeing on how to do right by teachers.”
Aside from being funded themselves, educators are sounding the alarm on classroom funding, too.
A study released in December from the Education Law Center gave North Carolina an F for its ranking of 50 of 51 based on the amount of state and local revenue it spends per student. The state received another F in funding effort with the study saying North Carolina “makes a lower than average effort to fund its schools” despite the state’s fiscal capacity being categorized as average.
The state received a C for its ranking of 17 of 48 in funding distribution for its “progressive” allocation of funds in which high-poverty districts receive 5% more per student than low-poverty districts. The passing grade might seem ironic given recently renewed restlessness over a decades-old school funding case, Leandro v. State of North Carolina, after the state Supreme Court once again delayed a ruling in December.
In the 1994 lawsuit, the plaintiffs from five low-wealth counties claimed the state was not fulfilling its constitutional duty to provide a sound, basic education to all children on the argument that their children didn’t have access to the same education and resources as children in wealthier districts.
Despite multiple rulings in favor of Leandro spanning decades — the most recent being in 2022 — the newly-Republican majority state Supreme Court reheard the case in February 2024, but has yet to issue a decision nearly two years later.
Educators are pushing for the court to settle Leandro once and for all and enforce the additional funding recommended as part of the remedial plan developed for the state in 2019.
In a December press conference, North Carolina Association of Educators President Tamika Walker Kelly said the court’s delaying of a ruling was neglectful of students and educators, as well as the legislature’s lack of an approved budget.
“Once again, (the state Supreme Court) ignored the Leandro case, the clear constitutional promise that every child in this state is entitled to a sound basic education,” she said.
“And with that choice, they made a decision to neglect almost 1.5 million public school children here in North Carolina. They neglected their needs for books in classrooms. They neglected their need for school counselors and nurses in our buildings, they neglected the need for us to have safe buildings, smaller class sizes and educators who are supported — not exhausted and burnt out.”
Honoring the court’s consistent rulings in favor of Leandro is key for school funding in the state for a number of reasons, Lloyd said. While the funding schools would receive as a result of the Leandro case would go toward all the typical classroom resources, it would also help provide additional support staff in schools and thus teacher retention and satisfaction.
While protests requiring absent teachers can often garner criticism, such as the massive 2018 Red4Ed march that led to closures in over 40 school districts for the day, Lloyd said it’s not about taking a day off. It’s necessary in order to draw attention to the issues facing educators, students and the state at-large.
“It’s not about leaving our students at school,” she said.
“It’s very much about that we need the citizens of North Carolina to truly understand what the issues are with public education so that our students and us in our schools can be fully funded.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may republish our stories for free, online or in print. Simply copy and paste the article contents from the box below. Note, some images and interactive features may not be included here.
