Ray LeGroen is a public school teacher, a CMS parent, and a member of the North Carolina Association of Educators. On the evening of March 17, he walked into the Mecklenburg County Board of County Commissioners meeting and signed up for public comment.
He had three minutes. He used them.
LeGroen asked the board to pass a resolution supporting the NCAE's "Kids Over Corporations" campaign, a statewide push calling on the North Carolina General Assembly to fund public schools over corporate tax cuts. He did not come with feelings. He came with numbers.
The Education Law Center's "Making the Grade 2025" report, released in December, ranked North Carolina 51st out of 51 jurisdictions — including the District of Columbia — in education funding effort. That is the measure of how much a state invests in public schools as a percentage of its gross domestic product. Dead last. Not close to last. Last.
The state also ranked second-to-last nationally for per-pupil spending, putting roughly $5,600 less per student into classrooms than the national average. North Carolina's corporate income tax sits at 2.25 percent — the lowest among states that still impose one — and is on a legally scheduled path to zero by 2030. Meanwhile, statewide spending on private school vouchers through the Opportunity Scholarship program jumped from $185.5 million in 2023-24 to $533.5 million in the current school year.
LeGroen laid all of this on the public record in under three minutes. Then he sat down.
What happened next was nothing.
No commissioner responded to his resolution request from the dais. None indicated whether his ask would be taken up at a future meeting. The Mercury contacted the county clerk's office to ask whether any resolution was pending. No response was received before publication.
But something else happened, too — slowly, and without anyone drawing a line back to the teacher who started it.
Commissioner Laura Meier mentioned that she and several colleagues had recently attended a League of Women Voters panel on public school support. She and Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell had also attended a separate meeting with an education advocacy group. Both described what they heard as confirmation of something structural, not partisan.
"We used to be the education state," Meier said from the dais. "We're not there anymore."
Rodriguez-McDowell went further. Earlier that week, she had attended a ribbon cutting for City Bank, where North Carolina's top ranking for business was the headline. She brought that fact to the dais and set it next to the other one.
"We're number one in business," she told her colleagues. "But we're number 50 in education funding." She added that the state's workers rank similarly low in wage measures. All three facts, she said, belong in the same sentence. In most public settings, they do not appear there together.
It was the sharpest observation of the night. First in business. Last in schools. Rodriguez-McDowell did not resolve the contradiction. She named it. That is not the same thing as fixing it, but in a room where the contradiction usually goes unspoken, naming it is not nothing.
Commissioner Yvette Townsend-Ingram attended the same advocacy meetings as Meier and Rodriguez-McDowell. She did not elaborate further during commissioner reports.
Four commissioners spoke to the subject by the end of the night. Five did not.
Here is the part where I am supposed to tell you what it all means. I will tell you what it doesn't mean instead.
It does not mean the county can fix this. More than half of the CMS budget flows from the state. Mecklenburg can supplement what Raleigh sets. It cannot substitute for it. A board resolution is not a funding mechanism. Floor statements are not legislation. Four commissioners saying true things from a dais does not put $5,600 back into a per-pupil budget.
But a county board is a public body with a platform. Its members increasingly appear willing to use that platform on this particular question. Whether willingness becomes action — a resolution, a formal letter to legislative leadership, a public commitment from the full board — is an open question. Four spoke. Five stayed quiet. That gap is worth watching.
And then there is LeGroen.
He came to the meeting as a teacher and a parent. He brought facts that are publicly available to anyone who cares to look them up, which is precisely why most people haven't. He made a specific ask of a specific body with specific authority to act on it. He did this during the portion of the meeting designated for exactly that purpose. He did it in three minutes because that is what the rules gave him.
The board did not say yes. The board did not say no. The board did not say anything to him at all.
Three hours later, four of its members said the same things he'd said — to each other, on their own time, without mentioning his name.
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