NC State Board of Education appeals $17M funding halt for school upgrades
The North Carolina State Board of Education and Superintendent Mo Green are urging the federal government to reverse a decision that halts $17 million in funding for school facility upgrades in North Carolina.
The board voted Thursday to send a joint statement with Green requesting the U.S. Department of Education to honor extensions for spending pandemic stimulus funds granted last year by the Biden administration.
'These districts will now face potential cancellation of projects or, worse, will not have the resources to pay the bills for work already done,' the board and Green stated in their appeal to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
According to WRAL, more than $6 billion in pandemic stimulus dollars earmarked for North Carolina public schools since 2020 has been spent or committed before a September 2024 deadline.
However, extensions were granted under the Biden administration to allow schools to spend the funds before March 2026, particularly for facility expenses due to shortages in materials and labor.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced last week that she would not honor these extensions, arguing that schools had 'ample time' to spend the money and that the extensions were 'not justified.' She suggested that schools could re-apply for extensions, which would be reviewed individually.
ALSO READ: CMS faces $100M funding cut as federal COVID stimulus expires
Four North Carolina school districts—Robeson, Halifax, Lenoir, and Richmond—had received extensions. Robeson County Schools were expecting $14.6 million, primarily for heating and air conditioning equipment. Richmond County Schools lost $1.3 million, Halifax lost about $886,000, and Lenoir lost approximately $252,000.
Robeson Assistant Superintendent Bobby Locklear expressed concern over the funding loss, stating that the district had already committed the money in contracts for HVAC, window, and classroom projects. The district has managed to cover one payment with $1.6 million from district funds but lacks the savings to cover the remaining $13 million.
Officials from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction noted that the projects across all counties were mainly for facilities, including window replacements, which require students and staff to be out of the building for extended periods, limiting work to holiday breaks and summers.
Robeson district's projects, including a new HVAC system at Lumberton High School, new classrooms at two high schools, and window replacements at three elementary schools, have faced delays due to supply chain issues and were scheduled for completion by summer.
Locklear highlighted the challenges of obtaining HVAC equipment, with one piece taking 58 weeks to arrive after ordering, and emphasized that many projects cannot be completed while students are present.
The district is preparing documentation for the Department of Public Instruction to justify the projects, outline what remains to be done, and provide timelines for completion.
Superintendent Green has taken a 'measured' approach to federal changes, aiming to minimize disruption to services for the state's 1.5 million students, particularly those served by federal programs.
VIDEO: CMS faces $100M funding cut as federal COVID stimulus expires
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
New grads are struggling to find jobs and they're being locked out of the labor market because of 3 key factors
A new class of young graduates is getting ready to enter the workforce this summer, but they're likely to face a chilly reception. In one social media post after another, entry-level workers are bemoaning the state of the labor market and how hard it is to find a job. 'It feels more likely to win the lottery right now than get a job,' said one young TikTok poster. 'This is not what I expected,' said another young woman on Instagram as she held a stack of resumes and wiped tears from her eyes. 'But I can't be delusional anymore, I literally need to make money.' The current labor market appears strong on the surface—unemployment is still low at 4.2%, wage growth is steady, and the U.S. added 139,000 jobs in May. But those numbers don't tell the whole story. A deeper look beneath the surface reveals a much different jobs market for entry-level workers. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22-27 was 5.8% as of March, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And a May report from Oxford Economics found that 85% of unemployment since the middle of 2023 could be attributed to people just entering the workforce. 'Top-line job openings and unemployment statistics aren't, in practice, reflecting the experience of new grads entering the workforce,' Mischa Fisher, an economist at Udemy, a provider of online training courses, tells Fortune. 'Because entry-level roles are in short supply.' It's no surprise, then, that employee confidence amongst entry-level workers just hit an all-time low, according to a recent report from Glassdoor. And more than half (56%) of this year's college graduates feel pessimistic about starting their careers in the current economy, according to another survey from jobs platform Handshake. A few different factors are likely contributing to such a tough job market for young people right now. Experts tell Fortune that a combination of factors including a cooling labor market, a hiring pullback prompted by shifting tariff policies, and the long-promised of integration of AI into the workforce, are all creating massive problems for a new generation of job seekers. 'There are now clear trends in the data,' not just vague whisperings, that more and more people are getting left behind, says Cory Stahle, an economist at hiring platform Indeed's Hiring Lab. The COVID pandemic kicked off a major workforce reshuffling, unofficially dubbed the 'Great Resignation,' during which workers were successfully able to switch jobs for higher wages. But that era is long gone. The labor market has become more stagnant, and quit rates fell from 3% in March of 2022, the highest in over two decades, to around 2% as of April 2025, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Workers who switch roles are also less likely to make more money if they do so. People who stay in their jobs are seeing an average of 4.4% wage growth, while those who leave are getting just 4.3% more, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That lack of turnover means that there are fewer opportunities for entry level workers to nab a role. 'We're seeing the labor market's version of the housing market's 'lock-in' effect, where employees are too nervous to make moves,' says Fisher. 'This freeze is blocking normal opportunity flow, so early career workers can't break in, experienced workers can't move up, and burned-out employees are staying put.' Trump's tariff policy changes, and their subsequent impact on the economy, is also creating problems for entry-level workers in the labor market. With an uncertain economic outlook thanks to on-again-off-again levies for major U.S. trading partners, many companies have pulled back on hiring until they get further clarity on what kind of economy will take shape in 2025. Around 30% of small and mid-size business owners say tariffs are directly impacting their organizations in a negative way, and 42% say they plan to pull back on hiring as a result, according to a May survey from coaching and advisory firm Vistage, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal. 'Business leaders are uncertain and when that happens they don't do as much hiring because they don't know what the next week is going to look like, let alone the next month,' says Allison Shrivastava, a labor economist also at Indeed's Hiring Lab. 'They're going to wait, especially for those jobs in what we think of as, traditionally, white collar sectors, which are often difficult and costly to hire for.' The promise of AI has been a looming threat to human workers for years, but there are now signs that companies are using the new tech to take over work previously done by entry-level employees. Many of the tasks that used to serve as a training ground for junior employees, like data entry, research, and handling basic customer or employee requests, are already being delegated to AI. Technical fields like computer science and finance are getting hit especially hard. While employment for people older than 27 in computer science and mathematical occupations has grown a modest 0.8% since 2022, employment for those aged 22-27, or recent graduates, has declined by 8%, according to a May report from labor market research firm Oxford Economics. That's compared to college graduates in all other occupations, who saw 2% employment gains. 'We concluded that a high adoption rate by information companies along with the sheer employment declines in these roles since 2022 suggested some displacement effect from AI,' the report reads. LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer Aneesh Raman, echoed that thought in a recent New York Times op-ed. 'In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging—the ways junior developers gain experience,' he wrote. Companies are under pressure from investors to show that they can do more with less because of AI, says Sam Kuhn, an economist at Appcast, a job advertising company. Cutting jobs, or freezing hiring, are ways to do that. 'We are starting to see the ripple effects of companies that have invested a lot of money into artificial intelligence, wanting to show that they're actually getting something out of it,' he says. Meta reportedly plans to use AI to review the platform's privacy and societal risks instead of human staffers. At Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella said in April that around 30% of code is now written by AI, a reality that likely factored into recent layoffs. And the CEO of payments platform Klarna has openly admitted last month that AI helped the company cut its workforce by around 40%. AI company founders are also getting more candid; Dario Amondei, the CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has said outright that the technology could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs. 'It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it,' he said. 'We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.' New job seekers can comfort themselves with the knowledge that it's not just their imagination—the hiring landscape really is tougher for them than it was a few years ago. That means they need to be more resourceful than their predecessors when it comes to outsmarting the labor market. That might include things like pivoting their job search to consider other industries or roles outside of what they studied in school. They also need to work harder to show employers that the skills they learned in college are a perfect fit for a given role. 'In the current labor market, new graduates need to find additional signals of skill beyond just a degree,' says Fisher. 'From certificates to demonstrated soft skills like communication, the candidates who stand out show they're already bridging the gap between school and skills acquisition.' Because the hiring process skews towards Zoom interviews and AI-driven recruiting, young people also need to take the initiative and reach out to hiring managers on their own, whether that's on LinkedIn, at a local job fair, or tapping into an alumni network. 'There are fewer opportunities now to engage on a human level with employers up front,' says Steve Rakas, executive director of the Masters Career Center at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. There remains, however, a reason for young people to hold out hope. Labor market trends are cyclical, and there are still opportunities out there for young people who want them, notes Rakas—even if they're not ideal. 'We're coaching them to think about not just plan A, but also plan B, C and D,' he says.'To be pragmatic, and also to pivot.' This story was originally featured on
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Two national monuments in California may lose federal designation
( — Two relatively new national monuments in California might lose their federal designation. The Trump administration is seeking to reverse the official reservation of Chuckwalla in southern California and the Sáttítla Highlands in Siskiyou County as national monuments, which former President Joe Biden established days before leaving office. Video: Trump blocks California's ban on the sale of gas powered cars Late last month, the Department of Justice issued a memo in which it determined that the Trump administration had the ability to revoke previously granted national monument status. The memo overrides a 1938 opinion by then-Attorney General Homer Cummings, who said presidents did not have the power to abolish national monuments. The DOJ argued in part that the president's power to grant national monuments, which was established by the Antiquities Act of 1906, should be treated as reversible by the president, as many other executive powers are. The department cited several examples in which presidents reduced the size of previous national monument designations. The Trump administration also said that Biden did not adhere to a requirement that the reservation of land be kept to the 'smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.' 'I would do it': Trump says he would arrest Newsom 'It is vital to preserve this unique geologic landscape that holds sites and objects of historical, traditional, cultural, and spiritual significance for Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples who have gathered Indigenous Knowledge and practiced and shaped their cultures linked integrally to this area over countless generations,' Biden declared in his proclamation establishing the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument. 'In addition to containing numerous objects of historic and scientific interest as described above, this area also provides exceptional outdoor recreational opportunities, including hiking, biking, snowmobiling, camping, hunting, scenic driving and canoeing.' The Biden administration cited similar reasons for seeking to protect Chuckwalla. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Former Stewartville home park community operator agrees to pay $135,000 in settlement
Jun. 12—ST. PAUL — The former owner and operator of a manufactured home park community in Stewartville agreed to pay $135,000 after facing allegations that it submitted false claims to the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency. The state alleged that Sun Communities, Inc. violated three counts of the Minnesota False Claims Act, an act that works to combat fraud against the government. The civil complaint, filed in March 2024, alleged that Sun Communities attempted to evict several tenants for not paying their rent. However, in these instances, Sun Communities received the tenants' payments through RentHelpMN, a federally funded program created after COVID-19 that provides financial support to help Minnesota families pay rent. According to the complaint, Sun Communities "repeatedly affirmed" that it would not evict tenants for not paying rent after receiving their rent payments through the program. RentHelpMN required landlords like Sun Communities to comply with the "statutory and regulatory prohibition on evicting tenants." The state alleged that Sun Communities applied RentHelpMN to pay for "unlawful late fees, pet fees" and other unauthorized fees. Hennepin County District Judge Susan Burke ordered that $33,824.09 of the $135,000 be paid as restitution, which will be credited to the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency. "What Sun Communities did was unlawful," Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a release. "The pandemic created economic hardship, so the government stepped up and helped struggling families make rent payments. It is disappointing that any property owner would accept those payments and then still try to evict their tenants. Today, we are holding one of those property owners accountable. I am grateful to the whistleblower who helped bring this wrongdoing to light, and I encourage other Minnesotans who believe government funds are being misused to contact my office." Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, who represented Sun Communities, did not immediately respond for comment. Sun Communities, Inc. previously owned and operated the community located at 105 20 St. NW, Stewartville.
