Red4EdNC rally tonight in downtown Goldsboro
By Sierra Henry
Published in News on August 24, 2018 5:50 AM
Mold, dead animals, animal droppings and peeling paint are just a few of the issues one teacher says are plaguing one North Carolina public school.
Tiffany Kilgore, who could not legally disclose the public school or county she works for, said that public schools like hers are focusing on Band-Aid-like repairs for dilapidated schools due to not having adequate funding to renovate or rebuild.
A choral teacher who lives in Wayne County, Kilgore described the conditions the school she works in -- the same conditions that her students have to learn in. From peeling paint and wallpaper due to leaking roofs and pipes to faulty air conditioning and heating systems, Kilgore has seen all kinds of conditions in a building that's not even eight years old.
Classrooms that don't have enough chairs, broken desks, broken copy machines and laminators, the list goes on and on, Kilgore said.
"We don't have any money to repair any of this," Kilgore said. "I was helping out a teacher last week clean out her classroom -- we found a dead baby snake ... We found a whole cabinet that was full of mouse droppings ... That had to go because it was such a health hazard.
"We had to go get our custodians because we were like, 'we're finding so many excrements from other creatures that I don't feel safe in here without a breathing mask.'"
Kilgore is not alone. She described a public social media page known where people are writing about the conditions in their classrooms and schools.
"People have been posting conditions in their classrooms where they have water fountains that have mold growing out of it, backed up toilets, backed up septic systems leaking," Kilgore said.
The social media page, she said, is one of the many pages affiliated with the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization known as Red4EdNC, which was founded in 2013 by Angela Scioli.
According to Kilgore, Red4EdNC is an effort to unify teachers, administrators and counselors in North Carolina to rally for changes in the public education system and funding.
Today, from 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., at Cornerstone Commons, 200 S. Center St., Kilgore and other members of Red4EdNC in Wayne County will kick off a rally to push for policy changes for the education system. Six other counties -- Macon, Buncombe, Forsyth, Mecklenburg, Wake and Pitt -- will be simultaneously holding similar events. The Red4EdNC Goldsboro teacher town hall and press conference is open to the public.
Red4EdNC plans to declare its grievances with the current state of education policy to elected state leaders and call on the North Carolina legislature for action.
They demand:
• An increase in per-pupil funding, adjusted for inflation, to pre-recession levels
• Salary restoration, adjusted for inflation, to 2008 levels
• Cessation of tax practices that favor individuals over the collective good
• Elected representatives who focus on removing poverty-related barriers to student success
• All North Carolina children have the opportunity to learn from good teachers in clean, adequately-supplied classrooms
• Assessment regimes are developmentally appropriate, informed by best practices in terms of span and focus, and should authentically assess mastery
• Major education policies should be created and debated in open committee settings
• Policymakers must develop a process that allows consistent input from educators, agency personnel and subject experts
"We're trying to unify teachers across all political backgrounds -- we're not trying to make this a political thing," Kilgore said. "We're trying to make education in North Carolina what students need -- it needs to be all about what is best for our kids and for us as professionals. We're still not satisfied with how education is right now.
"We're not satisfied with this little bit of a raise like it's trying to pacify us -- we need to see results for our students because at the end of the day, if we're not here for our students and the benefit of them, then we're not doing our job."
North Carolina is currently ranked 39th in teacher salary and expenditures per-student according to the Rankings of the States 2017 National Education Association report.
According to the report, North Carolina currently paid teachers an average salary of $49,970 in 2017, which is below the U.S. average salary of $59,660. The state also spent an average of $9,329 in expenditures per-student in 2017 according to the NEA report.
Mark Colebrook, an eighth-grade math teacher at Brogden Middle School, will be one of the speakers from the Wayne County Public Schools system speaking during the rally. He urges the state to make changes in funding that would allow schools to become more modernized.
He said that schools need to be updated to today's standards for technology and safety.
"I think we're so focused on taking tests that we lose sight of what is needed," Colebrook said. "Our infrastructures are not ready for the 21st century. Public schools -- a lot of our buildings, our campuses, are just so spread out."