Local public school students will be out of classes on Friday while thousands of their teachers go to Raleigh to rally for more funding from the state.
Durham, Chapel Hill-Carrboro, Chatham, and Orange County public schools added teacher workdays on Friday after thousands of employees put in requests for the day of the “Kids Over Corporations” rally (Wake County had already planned a workday before the rally was announced). In Durham, nearly two weeks before the planned rally, school staff had projected about 900 teacher vacancies.
This won’t be the first teacher march on Jones Street in recent years. Reilly Finnegan, a teacher at Hillside High School who was recently elected the vice president of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), recalled a similar day in 2018 when thousands marched on the state legislature in the state’s first mass teacher walkout, but said that this protest shows how unions like the NCAE have started to leverage their political power in response to the growing funding crisis of public schools in North Carolina…