By Dr. Francis Koster

The United States Department of Education is a significant source of funding of North Carolina schools, and is extremely important to North Carolina’s future.

Given recent actions and statements made by powerful people in Washington, destructive actions could range from all Department of Education staff located in D.C. staff being fired or as devastating as abolishing the entire department. Both have been threatened.

To be clear — I am not saying this is going to happen, but if you have kids in your love circle, you should pay attention to this possibility — because on average North Carolina schools get around 1/5th of their budget (averaging around $2,000 per student per year) from the feds.

Almost no one speaks of money spent on K-12 schools as an investment with huge returns. The more money a state spends on educating K-12 students, the higher the graduation rate. Over their working life, a student who graduates from high school earns 33 percent more than one who does not, and repays the state’s investment by paying more taxes over their working life, resulting in a more prosperous state for all. 

If your child goes to a North Carolina public school, the average amount the school district receives to educate them is under $11,500 per year — $5,000 (about a third) less than the average funding level of all the states in America.

Why is this state funding for schools so low? Because the state legislature makes it so.  

The investment money used to fund North Carolina K-12 public schools come from three major sources. The first is the State Legislature — $6,900 (60 percent). The second is from the local school district — $2,600 (23 percent). The third is the federal government —$2,000 (17 percent)

If you google “How fair is school funding in your state,” you will see North Carolina ranks 49th the country for the size of our state government contribution. And the only thing that is saving us from making our current disaster worse is the federal contribution. We are already abusing our children.

If North Carolina were a poor state, funding schools at the absolute bottom of the ranking of all states in America might make some kind of sense — but we are not. Our state’s economic activity per citizen is around $59,000 per year — ranked 31st in the country. We rank just about the national average in wealth per household (48th for underfunding schools, 31st for wealth). We have plenty of money in our state to increase the funding of our schools. 

Putting money in to K-12 schools is a great investment. We must not allow it to be further reduced for political purposes.

Editor’s note: Rowan County received from the federal government around $54 million for school year 2023-24.

Dr. Francis Koster is a retired pediatric healthcare administrator living in Kannapolis.