Forest sends his own message to NC teachers in response to Cooper’s email about budget
The two leading candidates for North Carolina governor are emailing teachers directly as they argue about who is to blame for the lack of state pay raises this year.
Last week, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper asked the state’s principals to share an email with their staffs in which the governor criticized state legislators and asked school employees to lobby lawmakers to negotiate a budget compromise. Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest responded a day later with his own email to teachers in which he blamed the impasse on Cooper’s veto of the $24 billion state budget.
Forest is running for the GOP nomination for governor in 2020, while Cooper is seeking re-election. Forest defended the Republican-led General Assembly and charged that Cooper “has not provided a full picture of teacher raises and education spending in North Carolina.”
“Lt. Governor Forest has had these emails for some time now, and wasn’t planning to ever use them,” Jamey Falkenbury, a spokesman for Forest, said in an email Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, after the Governor blasted out a one-sided politically driven ‘call to action’ on official letterhead, to every single school in our state, with half-truths and no context, asking teachers to lobby General Assembly members, Lt. Governor Forest thought it only fair that our teachers be provided with actual facts to set the record straight.”
Falkenbury did not answer The News & Observer’s questions about where Forest had obtained the email addresses for teachers.
Stu Egan, a Winston-Salem/Forysth County high school English teacher, said he wishes both candidates would stop with the emails to educators.
“I don’t like getting those kinds of emails period,” Egan said in an interview Wednesday. “They just sound political in nature.”
Teachers and school support staff haven’t gotten state pay raises this year, because they’ve been caught in the middle of the ongoing budget fight between Cooper and lawmakers.
Cooper had vetoed the budget and a separate bill on school employees, calling the raises paltry and citing other concerns such as the budget not including Medicaid expansion. He’s asked lawmakers to provide bigger pay raises.
Cooper charged that lawmakers are focused on corporate tax cuts instead of investing in public education.
Forest praises GOP legislative record
But in his email, Forest said he wanted to share with teachers “the true story about what has happened with regards to public education spending over the last handful of years.”
Forest pointed back to how Democrats were in control of the legislature before 2011 — during the Great Recession — when budget cuts were made to public education.
Forest tells teachers that the GOP-led General Assembly fixed state government, placed the state on “strong financial ground” and gave “respect that our teachers deserved after several years of neglect.”
In the letter, Forest points to the last several years of state teacher pay raises and increases in education funding. He said these facts “paint a much different picture than the information you are being given by the Governor and the North Carolina Association of Educators.”
“Please know that we will continue to fight for increased teacher compensation and overall public education funding just as we have done for the past six years, as well as in the most recent budget and standalone education funding bills that were vetoed by the Governor,” Forest writes. “We will continue to do so in a balanced approach that ensures government is not overspending, and we are prepared for any downturn in the economy.
“We do not want to ever put our state, or you, in a situation like North Carolina went through from 2008-11, when education funding was severely slashed, and teacher pay was frozen.”
Egan, the teacher, accused Forest’s letter of containing “glaring falsehoods” in a post on his Caffeinated Rage blog. For instance, Egan said Forest doesn’t talk about the negative impact the Recession had on state revenue and the impact of GOP changes such as eliminating extra pay for new teachers who get graduate degrees.
“Dan Forest to people like me and other public school advocates, he’s not a big champion of public schools,” Egan said. “It’s kind of hard to trust him.”
This story was originally published December 11, 2019 at 6:28 PM with the headline "Forest sends his own message to NC teachers in response to Cooper’s email about budget."
