Durham County Commissioners awarded top honor by North Carolina School Boards Association
November 16, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Durham, NC – The Durham County Board of Commissioners received the 2011 County Commissioners Award from the North Carolina School Boards Association on November 15 in recognition of the commissioners' outstanding support of public education. The NCSBA honors one Board of Commissioners each year at its annual conference and made the selection based on the following nomination letter submitted by the Durham County Board of Education.
When the Durham Board of Education sat down with the Durham County Board of Commissioners in the spring of 2011 to talk about the schools’ budget proposal for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, the mood was amiable.
"I think this is probably the first time in my tenure as a board member that we've come to this budget work session without any kind of trepidation or nervousness," school board Chairwoman Minnie Forte-Brown said. "It seems like we are in fact of one vision, one Durham, and we are all on the same page."
A scant couple of years earlier, that sort of description would have been impossible.
But budget strife and distrust clearly were history, not just this year but in the year previous. That is all the more remarkable given the intense budgetary pressures the county commissioners and the school system felt in those two economically challenging years.
The state legislature, responding to revenues cratered by declining income and sales tax revenues, was drastically trimming state allocations to school systems in a state where rapid growth was putting more and more students into classrooms each year. Significant layoffs and cutbacks in classroom instruction loomed from the coast to the mountains.
In Durham, the foundations had been laid for a different approach. County commissioners who had raised serious questions about fund allocation and management structure in recent years had been greatly encouraged by astute Durham Public Schools responses. With judicious staff trimming and greater openness, DPS had made our case to a board of commissioners that rallied to our side.
In 2010-2011, the commissioners increased county funding to the schools by $4.8 million, sparing many jobs that would have been eliminated without that increase. And in 2011-2012, the county provided more than $4 million additional funds again to compensate for lost state funds, saving more jobs and keeping class sizes manageable.
It is indicative of the commissioners’ solidarity with the public schools that vice chairwoman Ellen Reckhow, who had raised persistent and probing questions in earlier years, offered the view that Superintendent Eric Becoats and his team had done “an excellent job on this budget.”
Moreover, the county commissioners agreed in the spring of 2011 to place on the November ballot a referendum on an additional quarter-percent sales tax to fund educational needs. And the commissioners have been aggressive in providing for capital funding for projects such as a new City of Medicine High School and an arts-oriented new magnet elementary school.
It would have been easy, given the anti-tax, anti-government feeling of the times, for the commissioners to have walked away from those challenges. But that has not been the attitude of Durham’s county board.
In a time of great economic stress, the Durham County Board of Commissioners has been a stalwart and actively engaged partner and supporter of the Durham County Public Schools, recognizing the importance of public education to the county’s long-term economic prosperity.
For that, we at Durham Public Schools are delighted to nominate the dedicated public servants on the Durham County Board of Commissioners for the NCSBA County Commissioners Award.
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Jeff Nash
Interim Chief Communications Officer
P. 919.560.2602
C. 919.412.7947
jeffrey.nash@dpsnc.net
