Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has eliminated its dedicated Pre-K facilitator positions — the coaching staff that supported 176 Pre-K classrooms across the district — and folded the work into a broader kindergarten-through-second-grade academic team. The restructuring, already underway since March, was presented to the board Monday as part of a budget workshop that also addressed DSS liaison cuts and a $6.6 million salary-uncertainty reserve. Deputy Superintendent Dr. Melissa Balknight told the board the Pre-K facilitators had been operating as a separate unit — housed at the central office under an executive director of Pre-K, disconnected from the K-12 academic team that runs the district's literacy strategy. The facilitators visited classrooms roughly once a week, sometimes once every two weeks. "Pre-K was operating as if it was its own department, division, district," Balknight said. "Not working as a collaborative network with K-12." The district's answer is integration. The former Pre-K facilitators are being redeployed into the K-2 performance teams that already support elementary schools. Instead of a dedicated Pre-K coach visiting 176 classrooms on a rotating schedule, the K-2 facilitators assigned to each school now cover Pre-K through second grade as a single pipeline.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

Before the March restructuring, CMS had roughly 36 facilitators supporting 185 schools on the K-2 side. After merging the learning-and-teaching and school-performance divisions, the district now deploys approximately 83 specialists across its K-12 performance areas. Each elementary performance area received an additional early literacy specialist as part of the reorganization. The 176 Pre-K classrooms are distributed across three pathways: Bright Beginnings (the district's own program), Child Development Centers, and Head Start. Of the 176, roughly 76 are inside CMS school buildings. The rest are in CDCs and Head Start sites. Dr. Kimberly Vaught, Chief Academic Performance Officer, described the old model as one where Pre-K teachers planned in isolation. The facilitators assigned to them operated on a separate track from the literacy coaches working in kindergarten through second grade. "Pre-K teachers in the past prior to now have been planning on an island unto themselves," Vaught said. She cited her own experience opening Lawrence Orr Elementary, where she aligned 16 Pre-K classrooms with the K-5 academic program and moved the school from an F to a B. The district is also changing how it measures Pre-K performance. Pre-K students currently take the TS Gold assessment, which measures developmental milestones. Kindergarteners take DIBELS, which measures reading readiness. The two assessments do not produce comparable data — a child can score well on TS Gold and still arrive at kindergarten below the reading proficiency target. By integrating Pre-K into the K-2 team, the district says it can better predict which students will struggle at the kindergarten transition and intervene earlier.

What the Board Heard

Board Member Shamaiye Haynes pressed the administration for a plain-language explanation. After several rounds of questions, she arrived at the core trade-off: the district is using the same number of people to cover a wider grade range. "What we're really saying is that we're going to use the same amount of people, but extend them to support K through two," Haynes said. Hill confirmed. Haynes did not say whether she considered that an improvement or a dilution. The question she left on the table — whether stretching the same staff across more classrooms improves outcomes or spreads expertise thinner — is the one the restructuring will have to answer with data. Board Member Lenora Shipp wanted to know what happens to the Pre-K teachers themselves. Her concern was practical: what does daily coaching and planning support look like for a Pre-K teacher whose dedicated facilitator has been reassigned to a K-2 team with a larger portfolio? Vaught said principals would now have more direct authority over Pre-K instruction in their buildings, and that assistant superintendents would be held accountable for Pre-K-through-five outcomes rather than K-5 alone. "176 classrooms," Shipp said. "That's a lot."

What This Connects To

The Pre-K restructuring is the district's upstream answer to a kindergarten literacy problem it has been tracking publicly. In April, the Mercury reported that CMS kindergarten literacy hit a four-year high — but that 4,858 students remained below the proficiency target and third-grade performance was stagnant. The logic behind the Pre-K integration is that if the same team coaches Pre-K and kindergarten, the handoff between the two produces fewer students who arrive unprepared. Whether that logic holds depends on whether K-2 specialists now responsible for Pre-K through second grade can give 176 Pre-K classrooms the same depth of support that a dedicated team once provided. The board denied Hill's $2.1 billion budget 8-1 on April 29 and is working through line items one at a time. The Pre-K facilitator elimination is not a separate budget cut — it is a restructuring that the administration says would have happened regardless of the budget pressure. The board has not yet voted on whether to accept it.

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