North Carolina is the top-ranked state for business in America. It is also dead last — 51st out of 51 jurisdictions including the District of Columbia — in how much it invests in public education as a share of its own economy. Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell attended a ribbon cutting for City Bank earlier in the week where the first fact was celebrated. She brought the second one to the dais on Tuesday night, and she did not let go of it easily.
"We're number one in business," she told colleagues near the end of a three-and-a-half-hour meeting. "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.
The occasion was the Mecklenburg County Board of County Commissioners regular meeting on March 17. Rodriguez-McDowell was not the only commissioner who found her way back to the subject. By the end of the night, four of them had spoken to it from the dais — unprompted, hours after it first came up, on their own time.
It started with Ray LeGroen.
LeGroen is a public school teacher, a parent of CMS students, and a member of both NCAE and CMS. He came during public comment with a specific ask: he wanted 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 had three minutes.
His argument rested on documented ground. The Education Law Center's "Making the Grade 2025" report, released in December, ranked North Carolina dead last for education funding effort — the measure of how much a state invests in public schools as a percentage of its GDP. 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. The state's corporate income tax, currently at 2.25 percent — the lowest among states that still impose one — is on a legally scheduled path to zero by 2030. Statewide spending on private school vouchers through the Opportunity Scholarship program has jumped from $185.5 million in 2023-24 to $533.5 million in the current school year.
No commissioner responded to his resolution request from the dais. None indicated whether the 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. That silence is part of the story.
What happened instead, over the following two hours, is also part of it.
Commissioner Laura Meier said she and several colleagues had recently attended a League of Women Voters panel on public school support. What she heard there confirmed a point she had already believed: North Carolina's education funding problem is not partisan, it is structural. "We used to be the education state," she said from the dais. "We're not there anymore." She and Commissioner Rodriguez-McDowell also attended a separate meeting with an education advocacy group. Both described the underlying issue as one that crosses party lines.
Rodriguez-McDowell's contrast — first in business, last in schools — was the sharpest observation of the night and the one that connected most directly to what LeGroen had said three hours earlier. If the state can sustain a national reputation as the best place to do business while investing less in public education than any other state in the country, she suggested, something in that equation eventually gives.
Commissioner Yvette Townsend-Ingram attended the same advocacy meeting as Meier and Rodriguez-McDowell. She did not elaborate further during commissioner reports.
None of this is the county's problem to solve through its budget. As LeGroen noted, 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.
But the board is a public body with a platform, and increasingly its members 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 — remains to be seen. Four commissioners spoke Tuesday. Five did not. That gap matters too.
A teacher came with a specific ask. The room heard him. What it does next is the story the Mercury will follow.
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