New Hanover County Schools has the same number of positions as last year — 2,662 for 23,448 students. However, 47% of district schools added positions, 40% lost some, and about 10% maintained their staffing levels. These shifts are nuanced, driven by available state and local funding, student enrollment numbers, and school and student demand for certain course offerings.
Across the district’s 40-plus schools, staffing levels have stayed the same on average. However, around 17 schools received more positions than others.
The largest increases were at Freeman Elementary School, which added around 10 employees compared to the previous year. Wrightsboro Elementary added around 6 staff members. Freeman is identified as a low-performing school; they received an ‘F’ on last year’s school report card and didn’t meet student expectations for growth — the latter is a measure year-over-year academic progress, regardless of whether students are at grade level. Wrightsboro received a ‘D’, though the school exceeded expectations.
In terms of specific positions, Freeman received three additional teachers, two exceptional children teachers, and three EC teaching assistants. They also received an additional staff member from an Endowment grant.
Some of the larger position losses were at Hoggard High and Sunset Park Elementary, both down about six positions compared to last year. However, Hoggard gained two assistant principal positions, and Sunset Elementary received an additional staff member from The Endowment.
Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Jen Geller said position allocation is a difficult conversation to have with the community because it’s more about making work what the district can afford.
“There are different school communities [which have] different needs, [...] So the state might allocate one size fits all, but we really can't operate allocating teachers to schools that way, so that's our challenge,” she said.
Echoing one of NHCS Superintendent Dr. Chris Barnes most common refrains, Geller said the state allocations “don't always cover what we need, clearly.”
The New Hanover County school board signed a resolution to increase the allotment formula for exceptional children; however, the state legislature did not take it up last budget cycle, nor did it change how it allots general education staff.
Since the state doesn’t cover all the position needs, the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners approved picking up the tab for additional positions.
Geller added, “There's just a lot of pieces that go into making these decisions about what we can and can't offer, how big do we want class sizes, what kind of support do we want to have available; what are we required to offer.”
Sometimes it’s electives where the district has to choose how to share positions among its schools — and because exceptional children services are “woefully underfunded,” sometimes they have to divert money to providing those services to those students.
The district also has to get creative about how they keep offering electives like art, music, orchestra, and foreign languages, for example. Geller said there isn’t a reality where the state says that each school gets one of these teachers.
“We've got orchestra shared, so if we don't have enough in one place and not enough in another, and we can share; we can half and half that person, and then that allows us to either hire somewhere else or, typically, hire somewhere else where there might be a greater need,” she said. “So in a perfect world, you could have your one orchestra teacher because you have enough funding to keep them at that school, but again, because of the student numbers and the funding, you have to make choices.”
Sometimes for high-demand courses, the district will pay an educator to teach during a planning period to extend the number of offerings for that course.
“We might not have as many staff teaching it, and what we may have to do is combine. So in some areas where there aren't enough to warrant an FTE, a full-time person, just for example, art one and art two are going to be taught in one block together, and that will allow us to offer more sections,” Geller said.
This is the first year in a while that the district has had to reduce Career and Technical Education (CTE) positions because of a lack of state funding, Geller said. For example, Hoggard lost three of those positions, as did Ashley and Laney High. However, more recently, they did accommodate more students for a carpentry course at Ashley because of high student demand.
Geller said if they need to move a position to another school because of one of the many reasons — funding, student enrollment, or demand — the district tries to allow that to happen organically through someone leaving the position or retiring. Then they shift the position after that happens.
Overall, Geller said the district has to make do with what they have — and that they can’t necessarily control the money that comes in from the state, federal, and local governments. They are given a budget — and they have to work within it.
“The money is decreasing at the same rate that we're having to adjust our staff. So we're responding to the reduction. So the response is dividing and allocating. We would not be within our budget if we maintained what we had before. That bill was coming, and we wouldn't have had the money for it,” she said.
